It is difficult to not get swept up in the more recent educational hype about big data and learning analytics. As someone who teaches first year composition, I know the raw data being generated by the large number of students, especially in relation to almost any other course, is vast. Institutions have placement and enrollment information, course grades, and even related retention data. As someone who teaches most of my courses online, both the institution and the learning management system (LMS) company, have information about students’ online access behaviors and even more nuanced information about grades. For every single student I have, there is a bunch of both already existing data as well as more data generated on at least a weekly, if not a daily, basis. What is a single instructor to do with all this data?
First, let’s be realistic, really…what can a single instructor do? Do I have (easy) access to all this data? Do I really understand/know what the data means? Do I have the ability to (easily) analyze and synthesize the data? Again, do I know what the analyzed and synthesized data means? For example, with relative ease I can use BOExi to get information about a student’s placement score. In theory, those scores can tell me a student’s writing and reading ability; but I’d have to be willing to trust in the validity and reliability of the assessment instruments (and especially when it comes to writing, I don’t). Similarly, I might see that a student who earned an A accessed the online course twice as many times as the rest of the students in the course; I might not know that student completed their work at a coffee shop that bounced them off the internet network every hour.
Even if I could access and understood what the different data points meant, I might then try to cross-analyze data. Like, I might want to compare placement data with how a student is doing in my course, how often the student is accessing the LMS, and some data I collected (like what devices the student is using to access the course and whether or not the student works full time). None of that data lives in the same space, I’d have to manually identify, copy, and combine the data. And then, at the end of the day, acknowledge that I’m not a trained statistician nor, with small writing class sizes, am I anywhere near having enough numbers to claim something is “statistically significant.” In short, I just want to remind myself, and anyone else reading this, that trying to collect, analyze, understand, and act upon data generated by students in a writing course is not an easy task.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to end here. As much as I’d like to throw my hands up and walk away (like you, I’ve got plenty of other things to do), I do think single instructors can collect learning data, analyze it, and then implement meaningful changes. To be successful, I think a solo instructor needs to start small–focus on small pieces of data and implement small changes. For example, I know I can’t make assumptions about what number and/or length of instances of LMS access, but I do know that if a student does not log in after a certain length of time, there is likely a problem. I do know that a student who does not access the online course with their own computer is likely to struggle. I do know all students benefit from sincere instructor communication and engagement. With relative ease I can assess if it’s been a few days since a student logged in and send a “miss you” message. At the beginning of the term, I can ask students about what devices they plan to use to complete the online course and send comments and support based on that data. At specific points during the semester, I can assess how well students are doing and send messages crafted for each grade range (including those earning As, they can be reminded that I see and recognize their hard work). These are all small instances where with both relative ease and confidence I can access, analyze, and use data generated by my students. Next, I need to then figure out how to assess the success of these changes. That is a blog post for another time.