Tag Archives: Learning Analytics

News

K-12 Lessons and Higher Education Opportunity

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By Timothy D. Harfield

Dr. Ben Sayeski is Managing Partner of Education Strategy Consulting Dr. Ben Sayeski is Managing Partner of Education Strategy Consulting

Our spring 2015 series of learning analytics brown bag seminars opened today with a stimulating discussion led by Dr. Ben Sayeski, Managing Partner of a Virginia-based educational analytics firm called Education Strategy Consulting. In addition to demonstrating the visualization tool that ESC has successfully deployed in k-12 school districts all over the nation, he also demonstrated the value that can be gained in higher education through the visualization of even openly available data sets (like from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), for example).
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News

Emory’s MOOC Initiative Update

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By Stephanie Parisi

Stephanie Parisi
Stephanie Parisi is the lead instructional designer for the Coursera MOOC Initiative at Emory University

At our December 3rd Brown Bag Seminar, I presented on the MOOC initiative at Emory. Massive Open Online Courses are finding their place at institutions of higher learning, and Emory is no exception. Partnering with educational platform provider Coursera, the Emory Coursera team in Faculty Services (LITS) has produced eight MOOCs since 2012. The ninth course, “Ebola: An Evolving Epidemic,” will be released in early 2015.

Enrollments in these courses of study have ranged from 5,000 to 50,000 learners and have been developed by faculty across all subject areas. As you can imagine, there are several challenges associated with offering courses of this massive scale, one of the biggest is data and analytics.

Still considered to be in a state of experimentation, there are little to no established measures of quality for MOOCs. One reason for this may be that MOOCs serve different purposes depending on the institution providing them. But regardless of purpose, most institutions share the common goal of continual course improvement.
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News

Getting a Leg Up at Emory

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By Drew Kohlhorst, Ph.D.

Drew KohlhorstDrew Kohlhorst is Associate Director, Curriculum Development and Program Evaluation in the Center for Science Education at Emory University

At our November 6th Brown Bag Seminar, I presented on the development and assessment of the NSF-funded Getting A Leg Up @ Emory (GLUE) program. GLUE is a summer bridge program, designed to allow invited students from Emory University and Oxford College the opportunity to experience problem-based learning, interact with on-campus resources, and build a strong learning community in both residential and online learning environments. The GLUE curriculum uses case studies to engage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) students in a variety of subjects including biology, chemistry, physics, public health, and ethics. The case studies focus on quantitative skills development, data literacy and visualization, scientific communication, and the effects of STEM on globalization.

In order to assess GLUE, several instruments have been developed using surveys, interviews, and student performance data. To date, over 190 participants have completed the GLUE program (Residential and Online). Of these participants, most have been African American females from both Emory and Oxford College. Over 90% of participants have indicated that GLUE prepared them for college, helped them consider their career plans, and gave them a sense of community. Participants have also reported that GLUE provides an interesting and engaging curriculum, and an opportunity to self-reflect. GLUE participants report having more positive views on science, scientific research, and the role of scientists in society. These views are further bolstered by increased confidence related to scientific inquiry and process skills.
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News

Framework for using Learning Analytics for D Min Program Assessment & Improvement

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Roxanne Russell’s presentation today set an incredible tone of our Brown Bag talks this year.

After providing an overview of the new online Doctor of Ministry program in the Candler School of Theology, she offered the group a framework for program evaluation that emphasized the importance of meeting student expectations for their experience of the program. She suggested five key areas of student experience that have an impact on student perceptions of program value:

  1. Faculty Interaction
  2. Peers
  3. Curriculum
  4. Content
  5. Manageability

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Past Events

Learning Analytics: What Is It? Why Do It? And How?

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Emory University Laney Graduate School students are invited to attend for the first Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity (TATTO) Extension Brown Bag. These brown bag sessions will focus on topics related to teaching that were not covered in TATTO. Please see below for details about this session.

Students should bring their own lunches.

  • Introduction to Learning Analytics
  • Featuring Timothy Harfield, Woodruff Library Scholar in Residence (Learning Analytics)
  • September 10, 12-1pm
  • Callaway C101

Abstract:
Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. Data driven approaches to teaching and learning are rapidly being adopted within educational environments, but there is still much confusion about what learning analytics is, what it can do, and how it is best employed.

This talk will provide a general overview of the field of learning analytics, its terminology and methods, as well as contemporary ethical debates. It will also introduce several open source and Emory-supported analytics tools available to students and instructors to facilitate the achievement of various learning outcomes.

Events

Teaching and Learning in an Evolving Educational Environment

October 15, 2014 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Speaker: Charles Dziuban (University of Central Florida)

Abstract:
Chuck will present outcomes from twenty years of research on the concept of learning analytics through an effective teaching and learning perspective. He will compare student success rates in varying course modalities in addition to preference for instructional formats. He will show the characteristics of excellent instructors from the student point of view using concepts such as the Anna Karenina Phenomenon. Finally he will present examples of how individual faculty members at the University of Central Florida are undertaking an analytic approach to improving their courses with the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Presentation Slides

Speaker Bio:
Charles DziubanCharles Dziuban is Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where has been a faculty member since 1970 teaching research design and statistics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Since 1996, he has directed the impact evaluation of UCF’s distributed learning initiative examining student and faculty outcomes as well as gauging the impact of online, blended and lecture capture courses on the university. Chuck has published in numerous journals including Multivariate Behavioral Research, The Psychological Bulletin, Educational and Psychological Measurement, the American Education Research Journal, the Phi Delta Kappan, the Internet in Higher Education, the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and the Sloan-C View. His methods for determining psychometric adequacy have been featured in both the SPSS and the SAS packages. He has received funding from several government and industrial agencies including the Ford Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2000, Chuck was named UCF’s first ever Pegasus Professor for extraordinary research, teaching, and service and in 2005 received the honor of Professor Emeritus. In 2005, he received the Sloan Consortium award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual. In 2007 he was appointed to the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Policy Council. In 2010, Chuck was named an inaugural Sloan-C Fellow. In 2012 the University of Central Florida initiated the Chuck D. Dziuban Award for Excellence in Online Teaching for UCF faculty members in honor of Chuck’s impact on the field of online teaching.

Chuck has co-authored, co-edited, or contributed to numerous books and chapters on blended and online learning including Handbook of Blended Learning Environments, Educating the Net Generation, and Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. He has given invited presentations on how modern technologies impact learning at more than 80 colleges and universities worldwide. His new book Blended Learning Research Perspectives II, co-edited with Anthony Picciano and Charles Graham was released in the fall of 2013.

Event Sponsor
Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods
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Society for Learning Analytics Research
Events

Advancing University Teaching and Learning with Analytics: Linking Pedagogical Intent and Student Activity through Data-Based Reflection

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November 17, 2014 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Speaker: Alyssa Wise (Simon Fraser University)

Abstract:
Learning analytics are data traces of student activity that can be used to better understand and support learning processes and outcomes. Over the last few years there have been remarkable advances in our ability to calculate and display useful information about what students are doing. Now, we face the important challenge of how to mobilize this intelligence to have a meaningful impact on university teaching and learning. To do so, we need to consider and design for the ways in which learning analytics can become a part of (and change) the activity patterns of instructors and students. Working within the scope of the university course, I describe ways to integrate learning analytics into teaching and learning processes by using data-informed reflection to probe the connections (and disconnects) between instructors’ and designers’ pedagogical intents and students’ actual activity patterns. Particular attention will be paid to roles for students in the process, and the use of different reference frames for data interpretation. To ground the discussion, work from the E-Listening Project at Simon Fraser University will be presented as an initial example of a learning analytics application developed and implemented in a university course using such an integrated approach.

Presentation Slides

Speaker Bio:
Alyssa Friend WiseAlyssa Friend Wise is an Associate Professor with the Educational Technology & Learning Design Program at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her research examines how people interact with each other through technologies and how such interactions can contribute to learning. Recent work includes the E-Listening Project (research into how participants attends to others’ comments in online discussions), the development of Youtopia (a collaborative table-top game about sustainability issues), and the creation of a model for Learning Analytics Interventions (a pedagogical approach to help students work with data collected on their learning as part of the educational process).