e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Bob Hoar

  • Learner-Centered Analytics: Example from UW La Crosse MOOC research

    Last week I wrote a post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics. As a recap, my argument was:

    Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX data provides no insight into learner patterns of behavior over time. Did the discussion forum posts increase or decrease over time, did video access change over time, etc? We don’t know. There is some insight we could obtain by looking at the last transaction event and number of chapters accessed, but the insight would be limited. But learner patterns of behavior can provide real insights, and it is here where the University of Phoenix (UoP) could teach Harvard and MIT some lessons on analytics.

    Beyond the University of Phoenix, there other examples of learner-centered analytics exploring usage patterns over time. While I was at a summit at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse last week, Bob Hoar showed me some early results of their “UW-System College Readiness Math MOOC” research that is part of the MOOC Research Initiative. I interviewed Bob Hoar and Natalie Solverson as part of e-Literate TV, where they described their research project:

    The results to date focus on capturing and visualizing the student patterns, and progress can be tracked at this project site (go to the site to see interactive graphics). (more…)

  • Massive, Open, and Course Design

    Martin Weller has a great blog post up about course design responses to MOOC completion rates. He starts by arguing that, while completion rates are not everything in MOOCs, they are not nothing either. A lot depends on whether you think completion is an important metric to meet the course goals because, for example, the course is designed to help remedial students pass into a non-remedial track, or whether having students explore the content in a non-comprehensive way accomplishes your course goal. (Martin brings up an analogy by Stephen Downes that nobody complains about the low newspaper completion rates, which I have never heard before and which I love.)

    This is good stuff, but it starts us down the path toward a more radical re-examination of how we think about course design. Because while Martin is focusing primarily on course goals and how those should determine metrics, he’s beginning to raise the question of how individual learner goals should influence course design. And once you start asking that question, it changes everything.

    (more…)