Utilising student data to enhance learning and teaching
The Faculty of Land and Food Systems’ Learning Centre is very pleased to announce the eighth session of its 2008 Brown Bag Lunch series!
Please join us next Wednesday for a seminar presented by Shane Dawson, Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Learning Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Where: Food, Nutrition and Health Building Room 220 (2250 East Mall)
When: Wednesday, May 7th, 2008, from noon to 1pm
Please RSVP to Duncan McHugh. Refreshments will be served. Feel free to forward this email to any interested parties.
Session description:
The vast majority of Higher Education Institutions internationally, utilise learning management systems (LMS) to support student learning. Courses undertaken at the University of British Columbia for instance, are supported through the use of such a system – currently WebCT Vista. Increasingly such systems provide the essential infrastructure which mediates student access to learning resources, and facilitates student-student and student-lecturer interaction. LMS automatically collect data concerning student interaction with the resources and tools that are provided via the online environment. The unobtrusive yet ubiquitous nature of this data is currently under utilised as a resource for evaluating learning and teaching activities. This is in part due to the lack of conceptual frameworks which can validly and reliably articulate that data with broader pedagogical deliberations.
This presentation outlines an evaluative method that utilises data mining techniques to benchmark and evaluate teaching and learning practices. In this session I will demonstrate what interaction data is available, how this can be interpreted, what learning and teaching areas it might highlight and how to use the data for benchmarking, personal reflection and demonstrating course improvement. In so doing, the presentation draws on Land and Food Systems course data to illustrate how monitoring student online user-behaviour can inform teaching practice in a proactive just-in-time manner. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of over-the-horizon information analytics.
Profile:
Dr Shane Dawson is a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Learning Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research interests have focused on the application of data derived from institutional information and communication technologies (ICTs) to inform teaching practice. Shane’s work has lead to the development of specific ICT-collected lead indicators of student sense of community and course satisfaction. Shane now leads an international project furthering the potential for data derived from Learning Management Systems to assist educators and administrators in the evaluation and monitoring of student engagement. Shane is also involved in developing pedagogical models for enhancing creative capacity in undergraduate students. He is currently investigating social network visualisation tools as a potential resource for teaching staff to better understand and evaluate student creative capacity.