Living the interface between learning analytics and actual change in a HE setting
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
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)
The last post was about some of the psychological hurdles that we need to overcome in order for students to realise that they need to change and the one before about the importance for tutors of relationship building and setting short term goals. This short piece is about how the use of learning analytics data …
Interview with Janette Alvarado-Cruz (@JanetteValezka) July 2019The interview explored issues of strategies for tutors advising students who appeared to be at risk of dropping out or failing to achieve their potential. These questions are core to the OfLA Erasmus+ Project: what do we do from the point where learning analytics (LA) have identified that a …
Continue reading Personal Tutoring: strategies for changing student behaviour
Okay the title (and the whole page actually) is a little passive aggressive, but I'm reading lots of retention literature at the moment and I'll be honest, I'm sick of reading "Student retention has been a concern for some time now". A couple of smart colleagues have pointed out that the language used has changed(*) …
Continue reading Student Retention Research: A History Lesson
I recently wrote a pre-conference workshop for the European First Year Experience Conference called "Arguably the First Year Experience is 109 years old: How up to date are you?"(1) with my colleague Diane Nutt. This post outlines some of theory relevant to anyone seeking to better understand the transitions associated with becoming a first year …
Continue reading Students in Transition: the challenges of becoming a first year student
Student Engagement drives the learning analytics resource we use. That is, we count students' use of various electronic proxies that are associated with participation on a course. However, before discussing those, I want to explore the concept of student engagement. In the UK there are broadly three definitions of student engagement: Students engaging with the …
Connecting Learning Analytics with earlier work on Student Retention Between 2008 and 2011, we led a small research consortium looking at those factors that caused students to consider leaving early and those factors that helped them to stay for the Higher Education Funding Council/ Paul Hamlyn-funded "What Works? Student Retention and Success"(1) programme. The work …
Why use learning analytics? There are a number of potential reasons for Universities to invest in learning analytics (1): curriculum design, testing marketing effectiveness, insights into service provision etc, but for most institutions interest appears to be primarily about some form of student success. This may be about raising students' awareness of their own learning, …
