Learning Analytics to inform teaching practice Video Lecture | Teach Online: A Comprehensive Approach for Teaching Online - Professional Skills

so what learning analytics means to me
is the use of data that you collect
about the events record needle learning
environment and how can you use that
data to guide your design decisions such
that the overall experience is improved
learning environments can both be online
or in class face-to-face traditional
learning yes so the data that I am
collecting is basically or it could be
summarized as the interaction or all the
interactions that are currently learning
environment and by interaction what I
mean it could be students with the
students if they answer each other's
posts for example in a discussion forum
it could be students with the material
so you detect when a student is used in
certain resource students and tutors it
could be when a tutor asks a question in
the forum and students answer that or
the other way around so any sort of
interaction that occurs in that
environment if it is technology mediated
then you typically gain access to
recordings of the events that occur
so from my point of view the way I see
it is the first step that a teacher
should consider for using learning
analytics is actually thinking what kind
of problem or aspect do you want to
detect and act on your learning
environment you need to have some sort
of objectives so for example suppose is
I want to make sure that my students
don't drop out of my course or I want to
make sure that they sustain the
engagement all throughout the course or
I want to make sure that they know they
participate actively in team activities
so when you tackle one specific aspect
then you start again working backwards
and trying to deduce first what kind of
actions would be helping me to achieve
that and what kind of data will give me
an insight if those actions are working
or not so then when you put everything
together if you have this scheme in
place you would have data that is being
collected you're looking at the data and
see how does that relate to your
objective and then deciding what kind of
action is for adjustments you need to
deploy in the environment such that your
objective or your outcome is achieved
so for example sources of information
that you can get directly from the
students you can ask them about the
dedication they had with some activities
was it too intense was it not what kind
of activities did they end up solving or
not solving participating or not you can
ask them also about when do they get
these activities then how are they are
they going about doing this suppose for
example that you want to foster teamwork
you can ask them and say it so you do
these alone you do this with your team
you can even ask them directly is your
team working perfectly would you change
something on your team so that type of
information already offers you a view or
an insight about what happens in terms
of interactions and you can react on
that so the variety of data sources you
can have is is huge so you shouldn't be
obsessed with getting electronic data
only from online platforms you again
should be very creative and an open mind
and say but I need this information what
I need is inside about what happens in
the environment and any way I can see to
get that information is correct once you
get that information then the delicate
part comes which is the analysis or the
sense-making you have to make sense of
that data you collect it so if you have
the number of times that is students
logged into the platform plus the number
of times that post in the forum you have
to make sense of that and you have to
try to see if it gives you an insight on
the level of engagement or not and once
you make sense out of that data then you
decide what kind of adjustments you
would like to deploy in your on your
environment so for example suppose that
you get the data that half of the
students burley connect to the platform
or barely participate in the forum to
give you a simple example what kind of
action we decide it could be something
that simple as sending them an email say
by the way it's been 23 weeks in the
course I see that you haven't
participated in the discussion forum it
is important for our course and
therefore I would like you to
participate or tell me what kind of
issues or what kind of difficulties you
are finding for participating and that
type of action could produce an effect
in which you see either the student that
begins to participate or they come back
to you with some reason
by which the forum is not actually
working the way it should which points
you to another aspect you suitable for
improvement so I think the crucial part
is not so much capturing the data but
it's more like sense making and deciding
what kind of action would you deploy so
a concrete example that I'm using in
terms of learning analytics is detecting
so in my courses students are supposed
to use certain amount of tools to
perform certain tasks for the procedural
but we give them those tools and some of
the tools are optional but we want them
to get used to that type of environment
so one of the things that we are
observing is the level of use of those
tools so how often you come in contact
with those tools and where we have
detected is a correlation between the
set of tools that are used more often
out of three or four and academic
achievement so we see that certain
students that do not use a specific tool
within the portfolio they correlate with
low academic achievement so the actions
that we derived from there is try to
lower the barrier for them to use that
type of resource providing additional
support tutorials hands-on type of
guides kind of like scaffold a little
bit more that type of activity using
those tools such that they get exposed
to that environment and hopefully they
will translate into better academic
achieve yes another example is to
provide the students with brick
questions about certain topics that you
plan to cover in the class and you ask
them to read before coming to class
certain basic documentation and what we
did is we embedded the questions like
next to the document is basically you
can take make no difference between the
document in the questions and the
questions are grouped by topics and then
what we know before going to class is
what kind of questions were answered
more often and which one of those were
answered incorrectly more often and that
informs us on how to approach the
lecture we can go there and try to
tackle certain issues that we have
identified previously there are
difficult or there are our students are
struggling with coming to terms
with a type of procedure or concept or
topic and therefore we emphasize a
little bit more on the lecture based on
that
so my final comment about learning
analytics says is that it is a very
promising area but at the same time it
comes with challenges the promise is
that by knowing exactly where it happens
in detail in a learning environment very
likely will be in a much better position
to improve it but when you try to deploy
it in reality it requires a lot of
multidisciplinary work a lot of people
involved is not only something you can
do on your own only on your class you
will need support technical support you
probably need some strategic view at the
level of the institution so it is high
potential but also tricky implementation
type of trade-off for learning analytics
that's the way is it
you