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…)