Casting a Wider Net - Using Assessment and Analytics to Support Institutional Priorities

Student success and retention is a pressing problem for the vast majority of the country’s higher education institutions. Failure of the student is, in varying degrees, failure for the institution, and it has a devastating impact on individuals, their families, societies and yes, institutional resources.

This session focuses on utilizing assessment techniques and analytics to “cast a wider net” to meet these institutional challenges. The presenter will explain how analytics can be used to make predictive decisions, inform early intervention efforts, and potentially integrate usage information from mobile and pen-based applications.

The seeds of an effective early warning system exist in various academic applications. These systems collect an enormous amount of data about student activities, including: the number of times they log into a service; what they’re doing inside the course (reading, taking a quiz, posting an argument on a discussion board, turning in an assignment); and how much time they are investing in it.

This ground-breaking work is part of a new academic practice called academic analytics, in which learning activity data and grades are captured and analyzed to support academic assessment, improvement and accreditation. The session will highlight work at Purdue University which analyzed online learning management system data from over 3,000 courses and has identified the strongest indicators of student failure.