Living the interface between learning analytics and actual change in a HE setting
In summer 2020, in response to the first national COVID-19 lockdown, we used learning analytics data to manage a calling campaign to students who appeared to have been most disadvantaged by the transition to wholly online learning. In essence, we pulled together a team of volunteers to contact students who appeared to have disengaged from …
Continue reading Gravity assist: report of the digital teaching and learning review (February 2021)
The reaction time of a typical human being is apparently 250 miliseconds. In other words, it takes us about quarter of a second to get out of the way of a speeding snowball, or catch the dropped vase. That stuff's easy - 1. Danger - 2. React - 3. Try not to look embarrassed when our response …
Continue reading “Wait for it!” – Problems using predictions to instigate COVID 19 lockdowns
At the other end of the phone is a student. Your learning analytics tool has predicted that they may be at risk of early departure. Under the circumstances they are likely to benefit from a supportive, sympathetic conversation, or perhaps they need a nudge or a jolt to make them realise they need to re-engage. …
Continue reading Minimising Risk vs Maximising Success: learning analytics intervention strategies
At the time of writing, we are entering the final year of our latest Erasmus+ collaborative project. Onwards from Learning Analytics (OfLA) is a learning analytics project interested in supporting students at risk of leaving university early or failing to achieve their potential. We don't take the view that students ought to be retained no …
New student induction is a process. Students start their courses with some understanding of what it's going to be like, with a mountain of expectations and plenty of anxieties. Historically, universities often rush the transition process and seek to squeeze it into an administratively convenient week of guest lectures, important messages and introductory events. Of …
Continue reading Moving Student Inductions Online: NTU Welcome Workshop case study
I'm sick of COVID. I'm sick of the isolation. I'm sick that virtual isn't the same as in real life. I know we've probably only got months to go now, but I'm sick of it all the same. It seems that at the moment there is a lot of discourse is about how hard it …
Continue reading Teaching in a COVID world: how the sector moved online
This post is a piece of procrastination. And I'm partly writing it because Matthew Syed brilliantly describes a form of procrastination in his excellent book Black Box Thinking, but truthfully I'm just procrastinating because I'm putting off a task that I'm finding difficult. 🙂 The book deserves a better review than this, because I think it's …
Continue reading Black Box Thinking – a review and a challenge to universities
So using the principle of blogging as a back up for memory, here is a short explainer about the learning analytics platform used at my institution, Nottingham Trent University. It's an attempt to introduce the resource as clearly as possible. It's meant to be a short intro, so writing a long intro starts to feel …
Continue reading The NTU Student Dashboard – a brief explainer
In the Student Retention Research: A History Lesson I discussed the role that Mantz Yorke and Bernard Longden played in developing the field of understanding student persistence in the UK. I really value their model explaining student withdrawal (partly because they use the word 'adventitious'). They suggest that the reasons for withdrawal can be categorised into four groups: …
Continue reading The first year experience of higher education in the UK, Yorke & Longden (2008)
Between 2015 & 2018, we worked alongside some brilliant colleagues in KU Leuven and Leiden University on the ABLE Erasmus+ Project. I think that we spent longer on learning analytics infrastructure and operations than we would have liked. However, doing so gave us really interesting insights into the challenges of implementing learning analytics. By the …
Continue reading Six essentials institutions need to get right to implement learning analytics
