The education partnership between the USGBC and GBES is one of friendship, rather than competition. The USGBC relies on it’s education partners to produce best-in-class education materials for LEED exam prep and credential maintenance.

Today’s special guest, Arnold Kee, is the Director of Education LEED Data for the USGBC. His role is to organize and analyze LEED data related to USGBC’s education platform. He hopes that today’s webinar shows the importance of thinking outside of our own content and shows the importance of how LEED data can build a more sustainable future.

Arnold is joined by Corey Little, GBES’s very own Chief Technology Officer. Corey manages the functionality of the website, handles the server, and monitors customer behavior as well as a lot of LEED data. Click below to watch the webinar.

 

Below you’ll find our takeaways from Arnold’s presentation:

There are 69,913 LEED projects worldwide! Most of the projects outside of the United States are in Canada followed by China. LEED is a worldwide movement, and it’s spread is not limited by political party dominance. In the United States, both red states and blue states have LEED buildings and registrations underway.

There are 82,632 credential holders who must seek credential maintenance. Among these credential holders, most of them are BD+C accredited (39,107) followed by LEED Green Associate accredited (36,402).  There has been a recent rise in LEED Green Associates can be attributed to an increase in students seeking to become LEED Green Associates. These 82,632 are included in the 203,941 LEED credential Holders across the globe.

Badges are awarded to USGBC members who use their education platform. 1,367 badges have been awarded so far. These badges are a great way to distinguish yourself from your colleagues, dubbed by Arnold as a micro credential.  Badges offer a range of various topics, including an Energy Efficiency Badge and the most popular, an Indoor Air Quality Badge.

Currently, there are 53,937 courses on the USGBC Education Platform. The most popular course categories are:

  • Sustainable Sites
  • Materials and Resources
  • Water Efficiency
  • Energy + Atmosphere
  • Indoor Environmental Air Quality

459,676 courses have been taken so far. The majority of these courses have been taken by LEED AP’s who hold the BD+C credential.

The users of the USGBC Education Platform are subject to som

 

Below you’ll find our takeaways from Corey’s presentation:

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming

As CTO, Corey strives to abide by this, using LEED data instead of intuition to make changes to the website and its functionality.

GBES uses multiple data dashboards to improve user experience with their site and products. Among these are:

  • Google Analytics
  • GoToWebinar
  • Hotjar (user behavior)
  • Libsyn (podcast data)
  • Vimeo/YouTube
  • Facebook (Green Building Matters Group : Join Now!)
  • MySQl

Through these dashboards Corey can analyze the user’s journey through the website. He can identify roadblocks and things that are hindering the user experience. If something is popular, Corey wants to know why!

FUN FACT: 40% of GBES users fall between 25 – 24 years old!

 

Have you been studying? How do you fit into these statistics?

148,328,960 practice test questions have been taken since 2007.

191,767 total practice tests have been delivered.

The average number of practice tests taken by those studying for their LEED Green Associate is 27 – and 19 for those studying for the BD+C exam!

 

Top 3 Most Popular Courses from GBES:

  1. Fast Savings: Sustainable Design Choice with a Payback of 8 Years or Less
  2. 20 Things You Must Know about LEED v4
  3. Daylighting: Achieving Energy Efficiency with Sunlight and Lighting

Haven’t tried CE? You should! GBES reports CE for 13,362 people. That’s 16% of those have a LEED credential and are seeking credential maintenance.

 

GBES strives to be the GLOBAL leader of green building education. Check out where their users come from:

Country Users
United States 399,926
Canada 44,663
United Arab Emirates 20,571
India 15,532
Saudi Arabia 9,923
United Kingdom 9,352
Egypt 7,291
Mexico 6,556
Brazil 6,535

 

Got Questions?

How often are you looking at the data? What is the responsibility of a data scientist?

Arnold Kee (AK): The data scientist field is a field that is shaping itself. Tasks for a data scientist will vary due to the varying needs of organizations. Some will focus on coding or statistical regressions, some will focus on wrangling the data. I consolidate LEED data and present it. I send quarterly reports that show the performance of education partners on the USGBC platform. Daily questions that arise tend to deal with customer behavior. One example: the customer pattern. I seek to answer questions like, How do certain customers engage us and how often? How does this data affect products offered? I do a lot of internal data reporting and I field questions from the staff as they arise.

Corey Little (CL): Being the CTO, I am the keeper of all the data. I wish I could be a full-time data analyst. I check LEED data at the beginning of the day! Even before my email. The LEED data can be so powerful that it can influence the tasks I need to complete that day.

If you could pull any data out of your organization that you are currently unable to do, what would it be?

CL: We’re still working on trying to help our users on when their credential maintenance is due. We want to help them keep track of it and automate the process.

AK: I’ve been wanting for customers to provide consistent job titles. It would be better for me to make comparisons more easily. I want to standardize the job titles instead of letting them put in too many adjectives. There’s no drop down list yet. I could use Project Roles for data, but using actual job titles would make data reporting difficult.