I'm increasingly convinced that one of the most important survival skills for working in higher education is being able to hold (at least) two mutually incompatible ideas in your head at the same time. I think the issue arises because we try and apply rules, principles and realities at an institutional level with thousands of …
Psychogenic illnesses, expectations & student wellbeing (but first a diversion through lupus)
Lupus I have an auto-immune condition. It's not a disease, but something has gone wrong with my body's immune response, and it has started to attack healthy cells. These conditions are more common than you think: arthritis and multiple sclerosis are perhaps the best known and long covid is now considered to be one. The …
Analytics Lessons from World War II
Micro-blog post World War 2 is arguably the most important moment in history for the UK. The heroism, community spirit and sacrifice that arose during the 1939-45 conflict have done more to shape modern Britain than any amount of Tudor divorce nonsense or flukey Norman archery. Whether the Keep Calm and Carry on bobbins, or …
The problem with wellbeing analytics (& what we need to do to fix it) (part 2 – metrics)
There's something potentially of real value in developing and using wellbeing analytics, but there are also some challenges that need careful consideration. If the first set is defining wellbeing, the second is ‘metrics’. In essence, what’s the meaning that we can ascribe to the masses of data that we’ve got? Most importantly, what’s the association …
A New Model of Student Engagement
There are loads of really good models describing student engagement in higher education. Essentially, all these models seek to explain how the interaction between the learner, their institution and broader society influences student success. Pascarella & Terenzini (2005) describe them as 'college impact models’. They’re all useful, all interesting, and inevitably, all inaccurate (to some …
The problem with wellbeing analytics (& what we need to do to fix it (part 1))
At the time of writing (Summer 2023), the UK higher education sector has implemented learning analytics fairly widely (albeit in fits and starts). We have been using ‘engagement’ or ‘student success’ analytics since the early 2010s. Truthfully, the technology has proven to be good at identifying students at risk of early departure, but finding ways …
Continue reading The problem with wellbeing analytics (& what we need to do to fix it (part 1))
The Philosophical Case for Attendance Policies
In the most recent blog, I’ve received comments criticising the notion of attendance monitoring from both a libertarian and a social justice perspective. I think that the libertarian argument is that students are rational agents capable of making their own choices and living with the consequences and I think that the social justice argument is …
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“Do you know who I am?” Why attendance monitoring is never going to work in higher education
(I hate titles - they're either really long and boring or really, really click-bait-y (this manages both): the rest of this page is the caveat). I recently had a lengthy conversation with an excellent colleague about student engagement and attendance. She had been working with students about the problems with attendance and ways to improve …
The Curse of Knowledge: how it gets in the way of teaching university students
A very, very long time ago as a fresh-faced newcomer to the University, I attended a meeting with a venerable senior academic. During a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation, we discussed students’ transition into HE. The academic made an observation. He said (something like): “I’ve only just realised that each year, my knowledge in my subject …
Continue reading The Curse of Knowledge: how it gets in the way of teaching university students
“Never tell me the odds”: why scaring students into engaging probably won’t work (without a bit of a tweak)
I am currently looking at our own institution’s approach to attendance/ engagement monitoring and then the associated follow up actions. One of the approaches I hear from frustrated colleagues and senior managers is that we just need to tell students about the association between attendance and success. Whether done by scaring them with the risk …
Living Learning Analytics Blog 