Practical Learning Analytics

The menu:

Our smörgåsbord will include five major courses, each offered in both small plate and full entrée sizes. Each course will provide both a realistic data set and a set of example R code which can be used to conduct the basic analyses we will discuss. Small plate users will watch a few video lectures about their topic, complete a short quiz on the content, download the data and R code, and run an analysis to answer some simple questions. Users who choose the entrée will go further, extending the code in both instructor-specified and student defined ways. The really ambitious will repeat and extend these analyses using their own, local data. An introductory video for each course will outline what it includes and provide some sense of what users at each level will experience.

To keep the focus on the practical, the five courses are designed to explore analyses of interest to different audiences: students, instructors, department leaders, campus-wide leaders, and course designers.

1. LA for students: How to become the student you want to be? Exploring courses, majors, comparing your performance to others realistically and richly.
2. LA for instructors: Performance prediction in a course: up to and including grade penalties, placement analyses, performance disparities and their correlates, course-to-course correlation
3. LA for department leaders: Persistence in a major, first through short course sequences and then from intention to degree
4. LA for college/university leaders: Characterizing the student experience, program evaluation – observing differences and probing impact, capturing more and better information, comparing the experience of different groups.
5. LA for course designers: What affects performance – behavior measurement, establishing the evidence basis for advice, then acting to affect performance with technological and human behavior change techniques, putting real-time data to work – early warning systems and personalized communication