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Learning Analytics

 


Learning analytics offers an alternative to these methods of gathering feedback and reports from learners. These approaches instead make use of the data left by learners and teachers as they act: their ‘trace data’. These can tell us when learners join courses, when and how they engage with online activities, view pages, borrow resources from the library, set or complete activities or assessments, and so on. Any interaction with a web-based system can be tracked, and this data could be used to better understand what learners and teachers do. The widespread use of virtual learning environments (VLEs) – also known as learning management systems (LMSs) – has meant that educational institutions now deal with increasingly large sets of data. Each day their systems gather more personal data, systems information and academic records.

Learning analytics is a field of innovative research, but it is increasingly something that many educators and institutions make use of through new tools, dashboards and reports, using online data to investigate user activity. It helps to answer questions such as:

  • How many people visit the website / online learning materials?
  • When do they visit / interact?
  • Which links are popular?
  • How many people complete the activities?

Answering the questions posed above could involve analysing large data sets from VLEs and other technologies used for learning. Learning analytics can go one step further by providing actionable insights – they take trace data from educational settings and suggest, prompt or initiate actions to improve learning and teaching. You may have heard the term ‘big data’ used in discussions of technology. It is used in a lot of different ways, but essentially means that the dataset is very large and also very complex. Because of this, it may not be possible to use a simple, traditional approach to data processing and analysis. Learning analytics of the behaviours of large numbers of students can easily fall into the category of big data. But equally, you might look at the behaviour of one class of students over a course and find that useful insights can be gained without advanced techniques and tools.

For example, in an online forum discussion associated with a particular online module or course, a VLE could capture a range of forum data, including:

  • who accessed the forum
  • when they did this
  • how long they stayed
  • what operating system they were using
  • how many words they added.

Any of these data could be used to create analytics. However, only some of these analytics would be useful to teachers. It is not possible to identify which analytics will be most useful without knowing something about how the forum is being used. The presence of a learning design should identify the purpose of the forum in relation to learning outcomes. This makes it easier to decide which analytics to use.
Event: Live discussions on Zoom - Saturday, 10 April 2021 #cal-invite

[email protected] Calendar
 

Live discussions on Zoom

When:
Saturday, 10 April 2021
9:30am to 10:30am
(UTC+01:00) Africa/Lagos

Where:
Virtual

Organizer: Facilitators Master Class nkirubanjoko@... 234-8034635454

Description:
Live discussions on group work

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Cooperative learning

 

Group Work

 

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In today’s workplace, employers often look at potential employees and evaluate their interactive skills. These are skills that allow you to interact well with others in the workplace, and help you be a productive member of a team. Group work or collaborative learning is a great way to help students develop these in demand skills.

Humans usually gravitate to working in groups. It is part of our nature. We often associate with groups because of the social aspects; however, in a higher education environment, the purpose of the group is to identify and execute learning activities.

It is important when attempting to design group work courses and activities to make sure you know what you want the group structure to look like. Most groups are successful when they have a limited number of members. Limiting members to between 3 and 6 members is ideal. Too many members produce group situations where some students are not very active in the group, and less members can cause the students to feel overwhelmed with the workload of the groups.

Forming Groups

Don’t forget that groups, even small groups, are quite complex. A group has to contend with many aspects of cooperation such as work interaction, social organization, shared aims, and producing a collective product or view. Because small groups deal with such levels of complexity, it is a good idea to help your students adapt to the group work environment.

First be sure when creating groups that you as the instructor pick the groups or help the students form groups. Without any stipulations, students will form groups of comfort. They will gravitate to familiars first, and don’t necessarily think about what makes a group successful. As the instructor/facilitator you need to help students understand this importance.

Help students form groups that have a diversity of skill sets and perspectives. Having a group that has a single skill set or perspective can be detrimental to the quality of work they produce.

Group communication and etiquette

Be sure to inform students about their commitment to the group and the importance of their role in the group. Many students have an aversion to group work. This often comes from a preconceived notion of group work or a bad experience with group work. Their fears often range from being forced into an uncomfortable social situation, to fearing that the group work load will fall on their individual shoulders. Try helping students in the groups determine their role within the group. Be sure they understand the importance of the role. Without their contributions, the group project will fail or be incomplete. This importance also helps students comprehend the trust that is being built within the group. Each student plays an integral part in completing a group work and each member trusts the other member to being committed to finishing their parts. Make sure your students are aware and have been informed about this trust element.

Set the ground rules. Let students know that opportunistic behaviour is not tolerated in the group work. What this means, is that each student pulls his or her own weight. Equal participation needs to be established.

Be sure to get groups to establish a communication strategy amongst themselves. Often time group work becomes put off because of a lack in the communication plan.

Keeping groups motivated and on task

Another key to successful group work is establishing the objectives of the group. Without key direction, students will not know what outcome to work towards. A key job of the instructor or facilitator is to help students understand their objectives and to help guide them over or around any hurdles that could hinder the group from completing the work. Get students involved in understanding the objectives of the assignment by having them plan activities around the objectives. Have them ask questions and design procedures that will help them map their way to a completed objective. By being part of the planning process, students can feel more involved in the project or task, and can draw connections between learning elements as they help map their way through the project or assignment.

Also, when designing group work, make sure that the work is dynamic and engaging. Boring and repetitive tasks can kill the group dynamic and make the tasks of the group seem menial and unimportant. Getting students to engage in discussion about their objectives is a great way to keep them engaged with the material. Building in discussion sessions as part of the task can keep students engaged and focused on productivity.

Assessing Group Work

Determine how you would like to assess the groups that you will form in your course. Are you going to give a single group mark? How does this transfer to an individual grade? Will only you be marking all group submissions or will you involve some peer evaluation? These are questions you need to address in planning for group work. Some ideas you could incorporate into the assessment process is a formative self-evaluation of work. Have the individuals formatively assess the progress of their group and submit it to you. You can then pass strategic feedback onto groups and help their productivity increase. This type of assessment also helps you stay cognizant of any structural problems that can occur within the groups. Consider using peer evaluation as part of the summative assessment process. Arguments have been made that instructors are not aware of the group dynamic and, therefore, can not grade the groups work fairly. Incorporating peer assessment into the mix of how you evaluate the groups is a great way to understand better the challenges and successes of each group.

All of these elements come into play when creating group activities. Setting up and facilitating group work can be a lot of work for an instructor, but the pay if is great. Students tend to learn more from small group activities that include discussion, more so than they would trying to retain information from a lecture.

If you need help creating group activities in your class, please contact the Teaching Centre today. We will be glad to help.

Reasons for success in group learning environments

When students form into groups they realize that the success of the group is determined by the effort of each individual group member. Students feel socially tied to the group. If you have discussed with the groups the importance of their commitment to each other, then this feeling is reiterated. Generally students strive to succeed because letting the group down, has adverse effects towards them as well. Most people understand that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Most people do not want to be seen as the weakest link and strive to achieve individually, which is really helping the group propel forward. Individual responsibility among the group goals is key to the group success.

References

Group work in higher education: a mismanaged evil or a potential good?

Best Practices for Group Learning in Higher Education

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
What is Collaborative Learning?

 



After reading this guide, you will better understand collaborative learning.

You will get actionable tips on how to improve and implement collaborative learning within your organisation.

Discover:

The definition of collaborative learning

Collaborative learning is the educational approach of using groups to enhance learning through working together. Groups of two or more learners work together to solve problems, complete tasks, or learn new concepts.

This approach actively engages learners to process and synthesize information and concepts, rather than using rote memorization of facts and figures. Learners work with each other on projects, where they must collaborate as a group to understand the concepts being presented to them.

Through defending their positions, reframing ideas, listening to other viewpoints and articulating their points, learners will gain a more complete understanding as a group than they could as individuals.

Collaborative vs. cooperative learning: What is the difference?

There is some confusion about what the difference is between these two types of learning. In fact, cooperative learning is a type of collaborative learning, which is why at first glance, the two might seem similar.

The difference between cooperative learning and collaborative learning is that, in cooperative learning, participants are responsible for a specific section of their own learning and success, and also that of the group as a whole. They must use their knowledge and resources to make sure that all team members understand the concepts that they are learning.

The roles and structure of cooperative learning are predefined, and are often likened to the cast and crew of a theatre production: the success of the show depends on all of the interconnected roles supporting each other, but there is a director overseeing the project closely.

To think about collaborative learning in terms of roles within an organisation, in software development, a group of junior developers has a task to learn a new framework, then develop part of a program while using it. Each developer has their own part of the code to develop, but their work will only be successful if everybody learns and performs their part properly. Even though each person has a separate role in the work, the entire group has a stake in the success of others.

In collaborative learning, individual participants must also take responsibility for their team learning and succeeding, but their roles, resources, and organisation is left up to them. There is no director to administer the rules of engagement, so the group itself must self-direct.

The benefits of collaborative learning

Why use collaborative learning? Because every organisation can benefit from having an energized and informed workforce. There are many benefits of collaborative learning, both for the organisation as a whole and the learners as individuals.

The organisational benefits of collaborative learning

1. Develops self-management and leadership skills

When individuals are tasked with working together to achieve a common goal, they are being given the opportunity to develop high-level skills.

While having to organize, assign, and teach, they are learning how to manage both themselves and others while leading in a productive fashion.

2. Increases employee skills and knowledge

When employees participate in collaborative learning, they are developing a wide range of skills and knowledge. Not only will they strengthen their existing skills by having to teach others, they in turn will learn new skills from other employees.

This reduces the need for formal training while encouraging employees to continually upskill in known concepts and engage with new concepts.

3. Improves relationships across teams and departments

When individuals have limited contact across teams, it is difficult to foster connections and teamwork. Collaborative learning across teams forces individuals to develop new connections and find ways to work together.

This can be especially beneficial for organisations that depend on remote workers, as fostering strong connections among distant workers can be difficult.

4. Improves knowledge acquisition and retention

?have shown that utilizing collaborative learning may lead to increased involvement and better retention of knowledge.

The process of collaborative learning allows participants to achieve higher levels of thought and the information is retained much longer than when learned in a non-collaborative setting.

5. Improves employee retention and promotes workplace engagement

Employees that are given the opportunity to learn new skills tend to be more satisfied in their work, and are less likely to seek out other opportunities.

Satisfied employees are more productive and will engage in their work, leading to increased efficiency and output.

The individual benefits of collaborative learning

1. Turns learning into a truly active process

The learner must organize their thoughts, present a cohesive argument to demonstrate their point, defend that point to their peers, and convince others that their argument is correct.

This active engagement means that the individual learns, and retains, more knowledge.

2. Promotes learning from others viewpoints

Learners benefit from hearing diverse viewpoints. Studies show that when a person is exposed to diverse viewpoints, especially from people with varied backgrounds, they learn more.

3. Teaches how to think critically and quickly

The learner must quickly synthesize responses and, if they find that their argument is lacking, adjust their ideas on the fly.

Individuals learn how to think critically and quickly, while intaking new information and adjusting their own viewpoint as new ideas are introduced.

4. Promotes listening to criticism and advice

The learner will also listen to others talking through their ideas, offering their thoughts for or against their peers’ arguments.

This dynamic approach means that learners gain a more full understanding of the topic, as they have to consider it from all angles.

5. Develops public speaking and active listening skills

Individuals learn to speak well in front of an audience of their peers, to listen actively, to challenge ideas and build a framework of ideas in conjunction with others.

This increased social ease will help individuals both socially and at work.

6. Improves cooperation

When given a specific goal, learners are more likely to engage in thoughtful discussion with each other, improving both their understanding of the subject and their esteem for each other.
Constructing a Course Outline or Syllabus

 

Constructing a Course Outline or Syllabus

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A course outline is a document that benefits students and instructors. It is an essential piece when designing any course. The course outline has a few purposes.

A syllabus is a planning tool. Writing it guides the instructor’s development of the course. Through the development of a syllabus, instructors can set course goals, develop student learning objectives, create and align assessment plans, as well as establish a schedule for the course.

A course outline or syllabus also works as a guide for students. By setting course goals and student learning outcomes, you are informing students about the materials they will engage. The schedule also tells students what expectations are had of them and provides a timeline of these expectations.

Finally, a course outline also works as a reference for colleagues, administrators, and accreditation agencies. It allows others to see what you are doing in your course, and what is expected of your students. In some cases, others may refer to your course outline to determine what skills students should have after completing your course. Related courses that utilize your course as a prerequisite or co-requisite will likely build on the outcomes mapped out in your current course outline.

When creating your course outline there are some essential pieces that you need to include:

Course Description from the Academic Calendar

The University Calendar has a description of your course that gets published every year. It is a good idea to take a look at this description because this may be the description your students are using to determine if they wish to take your course or not.

Course Goals

What are the big ideas that you are going to cover in your course? What are the essential understandings that students will take away with them after the course has finished? It is important to define these course goals, as they will help you determine what you expect from your students, and what your students can expect from the course.

Student Learning Objectives/Outcomes

Designing outcomes is essential to designing your course and is a valuable element to have in your syllabus. The outcomes are usually statements that are verb oriented and directed at the students. For example: “Students will be able to identify key geomorphological formations on a Southern Alberta map.” This example uses the verb identify, which is a lower level thinking skill. A higher order thinking skill is incorporated in the next example: “Students will be able to read and analyze population maps interpreting any trends the data may show.”

Assessment Overview

The assessment overview is a grading guide that allows students to see what weightings can apply to the different assessment elements of a course. An example of an assessment overview is below.

Quizzes: 50%
Participation: 5%
Journal Assignments: 20%
Team Assignment: 10%
Final Exam: 15%

As well as including the overview of grading, a grading scale should be identified for the students, so they understand at what level they are performing. Grade scales can range between faculties and departments. It is best that you check with your department and faculty and use the scale they wish you to use.

Assessment Plan

Assessment plans are built in line with student learning objectives. Student learning objectives state what students will learn while your assessment plan states how you, as an instructor, will gather evidence for achievement of the objectives. The assessment plan will detail the type of assessments that will occur within the course structure, how they will be marked, and how they provide evidence of student learning. Your assessment plan will more than likely consist of multiple assessments ranging from online examinations to essays and group projects. Different assessments can and should be used to find evidence for multiple outcomes.

Schedule of Activities

This portion of the outline should be built once the plan has been made. Once you understand how you want to assess your students, you can create activities that help facilitate the learning that needs to be done to help students achieve the objectives. Course activities should work in parallel with the assessment plan. If students need to provide evidence of learning by completing a multiple choice exam, then the activities in the schedule should prepare them for this assessment. Lectures, readings, small group and whole group discussions can all be activities that help the student meet their learning objectives.
Moving your traditional class online

 


Are you moving your traditional class online and need to do so quickly? You might be feeling a little overwhelmed and not sure where to begin. Take solace in the fact that many have done this before you and there is a plethora of information available to assist you.
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If you start by answering these few questions, it will put you on a pathway to success as you design and implement your online course. Don’t forget that you should always start by talking to your institution, or search their website, for information about any specific requirements they have for teaching online courses.
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How will you teach?
You’ve got to start with this fundamental question. Will your class be an online course that will still meet via video/chat at a certain time (synchronous), or will it be a work-at-your-own-pace type course (asynchronous)? Keep in mind that students’ lives may also be disrupted by changes due to COVID-19 (kids now home from school, etc.), so you may want to consider an asynchronous course.
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If you will be meeting synchronously by chat/video, make sure you have an account with, or access to, software that will facilitate this. Your institution may already have agreements with online web conferencing software that will enable your meetings. Or, there are some companies that provide free licenses online (If doing this, be sure to check the fine print! Some free offers limit the length of the conference and/or the number of attendees.)
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If your students will be working at their own pace, but you will be recording videos for them to watch, make sure you have video recording software and reliable space on a school server to host the videos. Additionally, think about the length of your videos. No one really wants to sit and watch a 90-minute lecture on video. Consider breaking them into bite size chunks that are topically based and less than 15 minutes in length.
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How will students engage?
It’s easy to tell if students are engaged while you’re in a classroom. You’re interacting with them face-to-face, engaging them in meaningful discussions, and posing questions on the fly. How do you get this same level of engagement in an online course? Whether or not your course is synchronous, how can you generate an interactive atmosphere in your virtual classroom? Consider using discussion forums, self-directed learning, and small group work to assist you with increasing engagement.
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Self-directed learning can take many forms, all of which encourage the learner to formulate investigative questions around your learning outcomes and test their hypotheses. You could offer a variety of bite sized assignments and videos around various outcomes and allow the students to pick and choose which assignments work best for their learning modalities. Another option might be to have them develop a project incorporating several learning outcomes, or even come up with their own critical thinking questions around your course content and then providing answers.
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Discussion forums are highly interactive and truly facilitate participation. You could start a discussion and ask students to post thoughtful, meaningful insights in response (and if you make it for a grade, they’ll definitely interact!) Your topic question should be open ended, meaning it can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, nor does it have a single “right” answer. You should encourage students to post questions, comments, and insight, to which you can provide feedback, and advocate for other students to provide input as well. One piece of advice here, set out guidelines for posting in the forum, such as the number of responses required as well as behavior expectations. Make sure they are clearly communicated ahead of time.
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Small group work provides a more collaborative type environment that students typically enjoy. They get to work together to solve problems, share ideas, and discuss content. A truly interactive way to engage the class (and take a bit of the workload off of you), would be to give each group a different topic and have them create a short video and a few assessments around that topic tin which the other students in the course would be required to participate. Most students have ways to gather virtually in smaller settings, but you might want to make some suggestions on free tools that allow for group chats and interactions.
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How to Prepare for Online Teaching
How will you communicate?
Communication methods are abundant in this day and age, but you need to figure out what will be your main form(s) of conveying important pieces of information like assignments and deadlines. A few ideas for communication strategies are using email, creating announcements in your learning management system (or other online learning platform), and holding virtual office hours. Just remember, whatever you choose needs to be clearly communicated to the students on your first day of teaching online (or as close to it as you can get). It’s okay to be redundant and deliver important messages via several routes to make sure it is seen.
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With e-mail, it’s always best to use your school email account to bulk email the students as a class. It’s secure, quick, and gives you an easy way to archive all correspondence. Be warned, it can be a bit overwhelming if you use e-mail as your primary means of communication for an online course (imagine ALL of your students emailing you question after question). Perhaps you consider just using email for individual communication that is more private in nature (illness, grades, etc.), and encourage the students to post content questions to a discussion forum. Don’t forget, you don’t like it when people don’t respond to your questions, and students feel the same. Try to get them answers and responses in about 24 hours (or 48 on weekends), or whatever the set response times are per your institution.
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Announcements in your learning management software are a fantastic way to get out important dates, new assignments, suggested readings, and anything else you feel warrants the whole class knowing. Plus, many systems will automatically email the students when an announcement gets posted, so there is already built in redundancy (no complaints of never seeing the announcement for a due date then). Try to limit these announcements to 1 – 3 per week so you don’t inundate the students with excessive emails, and keep them short, sweet, and to the point.
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Virtual office hours are a great way for students to drop in and see your smiling face. You can set up 1 – 3 office hours per week or more and keep a virtual video meeting software open for the whole time you’ve allotted. Students can then drop in, like they would into your office, and ask you questions. Remind them though that this is not the place for personal or grade related questions if you hold group office hours. If you prefer a more individual approach, have the students sign up on a live document for specific 15-minute time slots.
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How will you assess learning?
This is the ultimate question. You’ve had your assignments laid out for weeks, you know what they were supposed to achieve in your face-to-face course. Now, you need to really analyze if those means of assessment will work in an online environment, or if you are going to need to pull together some assessments of a different type. You also need to consider the timeframe for assignments. Are you still going to have them do the same number or are you going to increase the number? How many assignments per week should there be? Consider these options for graded assignments for your course: discussion forums, group work, and online learning assessments.
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As mentioned previously, discussion forums are a great way to give out some points. One possible way for grading them would be twice a week – once midway through that looks at questions or comments they have posed, and once at the end for their replies to other posts. This method corresponds to your discussion participation guidelines that lay out the number of posts and when they should be made. One tip here would be to ask students to post on more than one day. This helps build the discussion and avoids a last minute “pile on” of posts that leave no opportunity for interaction. You can go so far as to make a rubric for how you will be grading the discussions, and maybe even consider bonus points for really insightful posts!
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We discussed small group work earlier, and you may have some projects you already use for your class that you could adapt to an online course, or maybe you do a quick search of the web to gather some ideas for projects. Group work assignments truly do engage the students and stimulate them to learn from each other. We all know that the best way to really learn something is to be tasked with teaching it to someone else, and that’s what we’d like to think is going on in the groups of our class. Sometimes it is, but sometimes one person is doing all of the work while the others kick back and enjoy the grade. To mitigate situations like these, have the students assess each other at the end of a project, and take their assessments into account when providing final project grades.
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Online learning assessments can include directed reading assignments followed by a quick reading quiz, watching videos (yes, there are ways to track who has watched and who hasn’t), typical homework assignments (that can even be automatically graded for you), and yes, even tests. Some learning management systems allow you to build these assessments directly into an assessment management tool, but there are also numerous online programs (or publisher provided software) that can make the creation and grading of these assignments quick, easy, and ready for launch!
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Right now, it may seem like this is an impossible feat to accomplish in a short window of time, but you can do this! Seek help from colleagues, publishers, and the web. There are many more resources out there to help you weather through this change, and who knows, you may see a positive outcome in the form of higher grades, positive student feedback, and increased engagement as a result!
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