This project will develop Learn Building Blocks and Moodle plugins to display information about student activity within the VLEs. Students will see views of their activity/performance relative to their peers in an anonymous fashion. Staff will be able to see a fuller picture of all activity for all students in a course with comparative/relative measures.
Staff will be able to control which aspects of activity/performance to display within a course to a student – some measures may not be appropriate within the context of a specific course. Staff may also be able to set various thresholds at which alerts to them or a student may be generated.
Each of our VLE platforms records a large amount of data about student interactions, but the ability to report on this, and in particular to display views of this information to students is not well developed. Basic course reporting facilities exist for staff, which allow them to see student behaviour on an individual basis, or interaction with a particular course element. There is no comparative reporting capability (student X relative to the average for the course) however. Blackboard also sell a companion Learn Analytics product, but it is still exclusively geared towards staff viewing student activities, and not students getting feedback on their own activity. It is also significantly more heavy-weight than we need. There is no such product available for Moodle.
This project will build on work planned for Jan – June 2014. IS TELS will run a series of workshops with Schools to understand requirements. In particular we will work with students to understand what sort of information is informative / useful to them, and what some of the issues around displaying this information might be. There is a need for caution and sensitivity around the messages that displaying some of this information to students might send.
There is a demand from across the Schools for more information about student activity and performance. This is being driven by personal tutors looking for more insight on their tutees, and by Schools desire to increase feedback and assessment scores (including initiatives such as LEAF – Leading Enhancement in Assessment and Feedback practice – a strand of the Student Experience work).
This project will deliver more insight for relatively little cost by making better use of data that we already have. Giving staff more insight into student activity will allow them to target interventions more effectively. Giving students insight into their own and peers activity will give them more opportunity to take action prior to any impact on summative assessment activities.
This project is related directly to the “Provide students with activity information to support self-reflection and engagement.” activity in the IS TELS strategy.