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LTERC SEMINAR SERIES PRESENTS

Academic Analytics: Indicators of Engagement

Presenters: The Indicators Project, Mr Colin Beer & Mr Ken Clark

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Abstract

Student engagement has become synonymous with the measurement of teaching and learning quality at universities, despite the absence of a universally accepted definition. The almost global adoption of learning management systems as a technical solution to e-learning within universities and their ability to record and track user behaviour provides the academy with an unprecedented opportunity to harness captured data relating to student engagement. This is an exploratory study that aims to show how data from learning management systems can be used as an indicator of student engagement and how patterns in the data have changed with CQUniversity¹s recent adoption of Moodle as its single learning management system.

Closely allied to the concept of student engagement is staff engagement.
Ken's study is an exploratory case study aimed at analysing one academic¹s teaching in terms of conceptions of teaching and its effect on student involvement or engagement. There is growing interest in the use of academic analytics. However, most of the reported work is being done at the level of institutions/groupings of courses. Improving teaching can only be done through changing the conceptions of teaching/learning held by the academics.

Can individual teaching staff, reflecting on their courses, learn anything important from examining their courses through analytics? How can this be done effectively? What do they find? This study uses an academic¹s approach to teaching + use as an indicator of involvement, therefore, an improvement of teaching.

Speaker Bio

TBA

Date of Presentation

17 November 2010