Living the interface between learning analytics and actual change in a HE setting
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
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 …
