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Think of it as higher education meets Moneyball.

Today, half of students quit college before earning a credential. Proponents feel that making better use of data to inform decisions, known as "analytics," can help solve that problem while also improving teaching.

One analytics tactic—monitoring student clicks in course-management systems—especially worries critics like Gardner Campbell, director of professional development and innovative initiatives at Virginia Tech. He sees these systems as sterile environments where students respond to instructor prompts rather than express creativity. Analytics projects that focus on such systems threaten to damage colleges much like high-stakes standardized testing harmed elementary and secondary schools, he argues.

"All medical school professors can view all medical school courses, carte blanche," says Coffman of the setup at WVU Health Sciences. "And part of their job is to review each other's content, to make sure they're not teaching the same thing and that something isn't getting missed. That's something lecture capture has enabled."At Grand Rapids CC, says Brand, the technology has also been useful for creating short tutorials for faculty development, and for evaluating the performance of students in an online instructor-certification course.

Ultimately, though, the benefits of lecture capture--freeing up extra time for class discussion, as a study aid, and improving faculty performance--have one primary goal: to improve student learning.

The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.

The average student in the Vermont study cycled through a whopping 65 new, active windows per lecture, nearly two-thirds of which were classified as “distractive.” (One student averaged 174 new windows per lecture.) But only one type of distractive application appeared to have any effect on how well students ended up doing on assessments: instant messaging.

"This is a course about what it means to be human, focused on some of the enduring questions our existence inevitably raises for us. The goals of this course reflect this focus."You roll your eyes, figuring the next four (or five (or six)) years were supposed to be about shaping your own destiny, learning how to drink alcohol without throwing up and playing a bunch of games until some ungodly hour in the morning. Grudgingly, you look at the reading list. Gilgamesh, Aristotle, Goffman, Donne, Portal....Portal. No, you haven't misread. But understandably, you look closer.Week 4February 7: Montaigne, Essays, selectedFebruary 9: Goffman, Presentation of Self, Introduction and Ch. 1February 11: Portal (video game developed by Valve Software)

"She's got her forestage and she's got her backstage, the stuff she doesn't want you to see," he said. "The game does an amazing job of slowly peeling back her veneer, and the stuff she doesn't want you to see or know is so slowly revealed. Those students started to exchange stories about what they saw behind the scenes or writing on the walls, little stuff they would find, little artifacts. That really provoked a lot of interesting connections between the Goffman text and GLaDOS as a character, as a personality, and the way that the environment is an extension of her and her personality. That really clicked."