(Well, one of them)I've felt for a long time that one of the hardest challenges in higher education is how do we make teaching first years interesting? How do we put our brightest and best academics in front of our freshers to inspire and motivate them. Surely our students are here to be wowed by …
Category: Learning Analytics
Two Tribes: why a single version of the truth is dangerous when it comes to student retention
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 …
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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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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 …
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Why don’t students attend personal tutorials?
Like most institutions, the university I work for has a complex relationship with the tutorial. We place a high value on the 1-1 or 1-small group nature of these sessions, but they can be hard to timetable, hard to room and, all too often, are expected to work as a sort of panacea. In 2020, …
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