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POLICY & REFORM
Prominent figures
The time has come for universities to harness big data for the benefit of students.
By Antonia Maiolo
Universities should be using the big data they hold on students to enhance success rates, a Deakin University academic says.
Retailers use big data to understand and influence consumer buying habits, Facebook uses it to target advertising and hospitals use it to predict patients most likely to get infections post-surgery. Associate professor Stuart Palmer says it’ s time higher education providers harnessed this potential.
Palmer says big data university computer systems collect about students and how they engage with their learning can be a valuable asset in understanding and perhaps predicting academic success.
“ While systems will only ever capture traces of a student’ s learning journey, if this information can be used to help student’ s success, then analysing the available data is worth the effort,” he says.
The types of data available to universities include student demographic information, measures of prior academic performance, student class attendance( whether on campus or online), submission of assignments, progressive assessment scores, and interactions with online forums.
“ Universities have always collected data about their students, particularly things like demographic data and end-of-semester results,” Palmer states.“ These certainly have some predictive power when it comes to thinking about student academic success … [ however ] they are not very timely.
“ More and more, students of all types – whether they’ re on campus or online – are using online systems. Universities are therefore collecting lots of data about the way students interact with their learning environments and their progress on much shorter time intervals. This is very timely data.
“ Combining those two things increases the power of the analysis you might be able to do in identifying key factors that contribute to students’ success.”
By learning to understand these analytics, universities will have the potential to translate data into practical actions. Providing rapid feedback directly to individual students on their current performance, knowing the key risks to student success and constantly monitoring student actions allows for the detection of issues and timely interventions to support individual students.
“ If you’ ve got good data and good analysis, then … it helps you make better and more timely decisions about teaching and learning at university in general,” Palmer says.“[ Then if you can ] start to identify and understand those types of features about learning environments that are conducive to student success, you can use them when it comes to the design of learning activities, assessments and types of learning interactions.
“ It’ s something universities should be doing. They should be concerned about promoting student success, student learning and quality of learning outcomes.”
Analysing the use of online forums is one example of how universities could do all this.
“ With online, or cloud, learning becoming more prevalent in universities today, student interactions with one another and their lecturers are also moving online,” Palmer explains.“ If students are being encouraged to make more use of online forums, then universities need to be clear on what is a useful form of engagement in these spaces.
“ Research has shown that linking the use of online forums to assessment tasks, providing a clear structure for students to work in, and asking students to make original, reflective submissions can all contribute to more productive learning from the use of online forums.”
Palmer warns that analysis is often easier, and done better, in bite-sized chunks.
“ A whole-of-university approach to learning analytics is likely to be of limited value,” he says.“ Taking a unit-by-unit approach would draw out more detailed and meaningful patterns of student engagement, and enable more relevant monitoring and actions to support student success.” ■
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