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George Bradford

College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...132945

analytics learning_analytics data higher education chronicle college degrees designed numbers

shared by George Bradford on 19 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Arizona State's retention rate rose to 84 percent from 77 percent in recent years, a change that the provost credits largely to eAdvisor.
  • Mr. Lange and his colleagues had found that by the eighth day of class, they could predict, with 70-percent accuracy, whether a student would score a C or better. Mr. Lange built a system, rolled out in 2009, that sent professors frequently updated alerts about how well each student was predicted to do, based on course performance and online behavior.
  • Rio Salado knows from its database that students who hand in late assignments and don't log in frequently often fail or withdraw from a course. So the software is more likely to throw up a red flag for current students with those characteristics.
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  • And in a cautionary tale about technical glitches, the college began sharing grade predictions with students last summer, hoping to encourage those lagging behind to step up, but had to shut the alerts down in the spring. Course revisions had skewed the calculations, and some predictions were found to be inaccurate. An internal analysis found no increase in the number of students dropping classes. An improved system is promised for the fall.
  • His software borrows a page from Netflix. It melds each student's transcript with thousands of past students' grades and standardized-test scores to make suggestions. When students log into the online portal, they see 10 "Course Suggestions for You," ranked on a five-star scale. For, say, a health-and-human-performance major, kinesiology might get five stars, as the next class needed for her major. Physics might also top the list, to satisfy a science requirement in the core curriculum.
  • Behind those recommendations is a complex algorithm, but the basics are simple enough. Degree requirements figure in the calculations. So do classes that can be used in many programs, like freshman writing. And the software bumps up courses for which a student might have a talent, by mining their records—grades, high-school grade-point average, ACT scores—and those of others who walked this path before.
  • The software sifts through a database of hundreds of thousands of grades other students have received. It analyzes the historical data to figure out how much weight to assign each piece of the health major's own academic record in forecasting how she will do in a particular course. Success in math is strongly predictive of success in physics, for example. So if her transcript and ACT score indicate a history of doing well in math, physics would probably be recommended over biology, though both satisfy the same core science requirement.
  • Every year, students in Tennessee lose their state scholarships because they fall a hair short of the GPA cutoff, Mr. Denley says, a financial swing that "massively changes their likelihood of graduating."
  • George Bradford on 19 Jul 12
     
    July 18, 2012 College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers By Marc Parry Illustration by Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle Campuses are places of intuition and serendipity: A professor senses confusion on a student's face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife. Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance. As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths-it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone's class according to her understanding of the material.
George Bradford

Assessment and Analytics in Institutional Transformation (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...235010

higher-education analytics learning educause assessments institutional-transformation

shared by George Bradford on 01 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), we believe that process is an important factor in creating cultural change. We thus approach transformational initiatives by using the same scholarly rigor that we expect of any researcher. This involves (1) reviewing the literature and prior work in the area, (2) identifying critical factors and variables, (3) collecting data associated with these critical factors, (4) using rigorous statistical analysis and modeling of the question and factors, (5) developing hypotheses to influence the critical factors, and (6) collecting data based on the changes and assessing the results.
  • among predominantly white higher education institutions in the United States, UMBC has become the leading producer of African-American bachelor’s degree recipients who go on to earn Ph.D.’s in STEM fields. The program has been recognized by the National Science Foundation and the National Academies as a national model.
  • UMBC has recently begun a major effort focused on the success of transfer students in STEM majors. This effort, with pilot funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will look at how universities can partner with community colleges to prepare their graduates to successfully complete a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field.
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  • Too often, IT organizations try to help by providing an analytics “dashboard” designed by a vendor that doesn’t know the institution. As a result, the dashboard indicators don’t focus on those key factors most needed at the institution and quickly become window-dressing.
  • IT organizations can support assessment by showing how data in separate systems can become very useful when captured and correlated. For example, UMBC has spent considerable effort to develop a reporting system based on our learning management system (LMS) data. This effort, led from within the IT organization, has helped the institution find new insights into the way faculty and students are using the LMS and has helped us improve the services we offer. We are now working to integrate this data into our institutional data warehouse and are leveraging access to important demographic data to better assess student risk factors and develop interventions.
  • the purpose of learning analytics is “to observe and understand learning behaviors in order to enable appropriate interventions.
  • the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) was held in Banff, Alberta, Canada, in early 2011 (https://tekri.athabascau.ca/analytics/)
  • At UMBC, we are using analytics and assessment to shine a light on students’ performance and behavior and to support teaching effectiveness. What has made the use of analytics and assessment particularly effective on our campus has been the insistence that all groups—faculty, staff, and students—take ownership of the challenge involving student performance and persistence.
  • George Bradford on 01 Feb 12
     
    Assessment and analytics, supported by information technology, can change institutional culture and drive the transformation in student retention, graduation, and success. U.S. higher education has an extraordinary record of accomplishment in preparing students for leadership, in serving as a wellspring of research and creative endeavor, and in providing public service. Despite this success, colleges and universities are facing an unprecedented set of challenges. To maintain the country's global preeminence, those of us in higher education are being called on to expand the number of students we educate, increase the proportion of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and address the pervasive and long-standing underrepresentation of minorities who earn college degrees-all at a time when budgets are being reduced and questions about institutional efficiency and effectiveness are being raised.
George Bradford

Seeking Evidence of Impact: Opportunities and Needs (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...235023

higher-education analytics learning educause evidence impact opportunities needs

shared by George Bradford on 01 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Conversations with CIOs and other senior IT administrators reveal a keen interest in the results of evaluation in teaching and learning to guide fiscal, policy, and strategic decision-making. Yet those same conversations reveal that this need is not being met.
  • gain a wider and shared understanding of “evidence” and “impact” in teaching and learning
  • establish a community of practice
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  • provide professional-development opportunities
  • explore successful institutional and political contexts
  • establish evidence-based practice
  • The most important reason is that in the absence of data, anecdote can become the primary basis for decision-making. Rarely does that work out very well.
  • autocatalytic evaluation process—one that builds its own synergy.
  • We live by three principles: uncollected data cannot be analyzed; the numbers are helped by a brief and coherent summary; and good graphs beat tables every time.
  • Reports and testimonies from faculty and students (57%) Measures of student and faculty satisfaction (50%) Measures of student mastery (learning outcomes) (41%) Changes in faculty teaching practice (35%) Measures of student and faculty engagement (32%)
  • The survey results also indicate a need for support in undertaking impact-evaluation projects.
  • Knowing where to begin to measure the impact of technology-based innovations in teaching and learning Knowing which measurement and evaluation techniques are most appropriate Knowing the most effective way to analyze evidence 
  • The challenge of persuasion is what ELI has been calling the last mile problem. There are two interrelated components to this issue: (1) influencing faculty members to improve instructional practices at the course level, and (2) providing evidence to help inform key strategic decisions at the institutional level.
  • Broadly summarized, our results reveal a disparity between the keen interest in research-based evaluation and the level of resources that are dedicated to it—prompting a grass-roots effort to support this work.
  • George Bradford on 01 Feb 12
     
    The SEI program is working with the teaching and learning community to gather evidence of the impact of instructional innovations and current practices and to help evaluate the results. The calls for more accountability in higher education, the shrinking budgets that often force larger class sizes, and the pressures to increase degree-completion rates are all raising the stakes for colleges and universities today, especially with respect to the instructional enterprise. As resources shrink, teaching and learning is becoming the key point of accountability. The evaluation of instructional practice would thus seem to be an obvious response to such pressures, with institutions implementing systematic programs of evaluation in teaching and learning, especially of instructional innovations.
George Bradford

Social Media Research Toolkit - Social Media Lab - 0 views

socialmedialab.ca/...social-media-toolkit

analytics learning_analytics TOOLS

shared by George Bradford on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • George Bradford on 17 Feb 16
     
    "This toolkit assembled by the Social Media Lab seeks to provide an overview of some of the many open access tools available for the study and analysis of social media and online communities. The table below presents the tools in alphabetical order and highlights the social media platforms they support and the features they provide. The list is not exhaustive and will be reviewed, updated, and enhanced in the coming months. The tools in this list offer varying degrees of analysis."
George Bradford

University builds 'course recommendation engine' to steer students toward completion | ... - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eer-students-toward-completion

analytics learning_analytics degree compass higher-education inside higher ed recommendation engine

shared by George Bradford on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • George Bradford on 21 Mar 12
     
    Recommended for You March 16, 2012 - 3:00am By Steve Kolowich Completing assignments and sitting through exams can be stressful. But when it comes to being graded the waiting is often the hardest part. This is perhaps most true at the end of a semester, as students wait for their instructors to reduce months of work into a series of letter grades that will stay on the books forever. But at Austin Peay State University, students do not have to wait for the end of a semester to learn their grade averages. Thanks to a new technology, pioneered by the university's provost, they do not even have to wait for the semester to start.
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