Serendipity35

Blackboard's data science people have done a study on the data from all that student clicking in their learning management system and aggregated data from 70,000 courses at 927 colleges and universities in North America during the spring 2016 semester. That's big data.

But the results (reported this week on their blog) are not so surprising. In fact, their own blog post title on the results - "How successful students use LMS tools – confirming our hunches" - implies that we shouldn't be very surprised.

Let us look at the four most important LMS tools they found in predicting student grades. As someone who has taught online for fifteen years, it makes sense to me that the four tools are the ones most frequently used.

On top was the gradebook - not the actual grades, but that students who frequently check their grades throughout the semester tend to get better marks than do those who look less often. "The most successful students are those who access MyGrades most frequently; students doing poorly do not access their grades. Students who never access their grades are more likely to fail than students who access them at least once. There is a direct relationship at every quartile of use – and at the risk of spoiling results for the other tools, this is the only tool for which this direct trend exists. It appears that students in the middle range of grades aren’t impacted by their use of the tool."

Next was their use of course content. That makes sense. Actually, I would have thought it would be the number one predictor of success. Their data science group reports "An interesting result was that after the median, additional access is related to a decline in student grade; students spending more than the average amount of time actually have less likelihood of achieving a higher grade!" That's not so surprising. Students spending more time (slow or distracted readers; ones who skimmed and need to repeatedly return to material etc.) are probably having problems, rather than being more though. The student who spends an hour on a problem that should take 15 minutes is not showing grit.

This is followed by assessments (tests etc.) and assignments. "If students don’t complete quizzes or submit assignments for a course, they have lower grades than those who do so. This was not a surprising finding. What was surprising to me is that this wasn’t the strongest predictor of a student’s grade." Why is that surprising? Because it is what we use to evaluate and give those grades.Digging a bit deeper in that data, Blackboard concludes that time is a factor as a "...strong decline in grade for students who spend more than the average amount of time taking assessments. This is an intuitive result. Students who have mastered course material can quickly answer questions; those who ponder over questions are more likely to be students who are struggling with the material. The relationship is stronger in assessments than assignments because assessments measure all time spent in the assessment, whereas assignments doesn’t measure the offline time spent creating the material that is submitted. Regardless, this trend of average time spent as the most frequent behavior of successful students is consistent across both tools, and is a markedly different relationship than is found in other tools."

The fifth tool was discussion. I have personally found discussions to be very revealing of a student's engagement in the course. I also find that level of engagement/participation correlated to final grades, but that may be because I include discussions in the final grade. I know lots of instructors who do not require it or don't grade it or give it a small weight in the final grade.

An article on The Chronicle of Higher Education website is a bit unsure of all this big data's value. "But it’s hard to know what to make of the click patterns. Take the finding about grade-checking: Is it an existential victory for grade-grubbers, proving that obsessing over grades leads to high marks? Or does it simply confirm the common-sense notion that the best students are the most savvy at using things like course-management systems?"

And John Whitmer, director of learning analytics and research at Blackboard, says "I’m not saying anything that implies causality."

Should we be looking at the data from learning-management systems with an eye to increasing student engagement? Of course. Learning science is a new term and field and I don't think we are so far past the stage of collecting data that we have a clear learning path or solid course adjustments to recommend.

Measuring clicks on links in an LMS can easily be deceiving, as can measuring the time spent on a page or in the course. If you are brand new to the LMS, you might click twice as much as an experienced user. Spending 10 minutes on a page versus 5 minutes doesn't mean much either since we don't know if the time spent reading, rereading or going out to get a coffee.

It's a start, and I'm sure more will come from Blackboard, Canvas, MOOC providers (who will have even greater numbers, though in a very different setting) and others.

I came across this "Web Accessibility MOOC for Online Educators (WAMOE)." Although there are no upcoming dates for the next live offering of WAMOE in D2L Open Courses, the site at https://weba11ymooc.wordpress.com contains all course content and activities that have been used in the MOOC. 

I know that many online educators are interested in learning about how to make their courses more available to students who struggle with web accessibility issues, but may not know where to go for information. This free MOOC, sponsored by Portland Community College and D2L, provides a free professional development opportunity to help eLearning professionals meet the challenges of improving accessibility in online learning.

I believe that using this resource in conjunction with a F2F cohort of faculty on a campus would be an excellent way to approach the topics contained in the MOOC. As with any learners in a MOOC, a hybrid approach to using the online resources is often the best approach to increasing completion of the c"course" and eliminating some of the frustrations of learning on your own.

NOTE: Much of the course content was originally developed by Karen Sorensen and other staff at Portland Community College. PCC also freely shares their comprehensive document titled “Web Accessibility Guidelines.” All course content is open licensed by CC-BY, NonCommercial, Share-Alike 3.0 with attribution to Portland Community College and D2L Corporation.

A very disturbing, but not really shocking, article titled "The New Cheating Economy" by Brad Wolverton this week on chronicle.com.  

"...On any given day, thousands of students go online seeking academic relief. They are first-years and transfers overwhelmed by the curriculum, international students with poor English skills, lazy undergrads with easy access to a credit card. They are nurses, teachers, and government workers too busy to pursue the advanced degrees they’ve decided they need. The Chronicle spoke with people who run cheating companies and those who do the cheating. The demand has been around for decades. But the industry is in rapid transition. Just as higher education is changing, embracing a revolution in online learning, the cheating business is transforming as well, finding new and more insidious ways to undermine academic integrity...

There has always been cheating on assignments, papers and tests. There are industries on both sides to help someone cheat and ones to stop students from cheating or to catch them when they do cheat. A student who copies a paper from a source online can be caught by software (turnitin.com and others) but it is much more difficult to catch someone who submits an original paper written and researched correctly by another student. That is what the article is talking about for the online learning environment, but the trend is far beyond buying a paper. 

"But in recent years, a new underground economy has emerged, offering any academic service a student could want. Now it’s not just a paper or one-off assignment. It’s the quiz next week, the assignment after that, the answers served up on the final. Increasingly, it’s the whole class. And if students are paying someone to take one course, what’s stopping them from buying their entire degree?"

There were stories decades ago about students paying another student to take an exam and even to take an entire class, but it was unusual and much harder to accomplish in a small, face-to-face class. Large lecture hall courses and online learning have made it easier, and companies have seen opportunity for profit.

I have seen a good number of companies and products over the past 16 years designed to verify the identity of online students. None seemed very easy to implement or foolproof. I imagine that side of the cheating industry will become more visible in this new academic year.

I clicked on a post here that I wrote in 2008 while I was directing the Writing Initiative at Passaic County Community College. We were using etutoring for writing and were part of a consortium of colleges in the northeast. (eTutorng.org - part of the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium) We supplied tutors to support the service based on the amount of usage our students put into the platform and our students used it a lot. 

As part of our writing-intensive courses in the Writing Initiative, students could submit their work up to three times and received a reading and comments from one of the consortium writing tutors (generally higher ed instructors with at least a Masters degree).

PCCC does have labs and tutors for the ESL students and for students entering at a Basic Skills level (pre-college) but did not have a center for college-level students. That is how eTutoring was introduced. We did build a writing center as part of the Initiative, but this online collaboration was an important part of the project.

Some students and teachers still don't trust online courses, but those courses, etutoring and online collaboration are almost a necessity at this point for many schools to supplement face-to-face experiences. 

We saw many similarities between what we do on the ground, and what we do with writers in the computing cloud, and another aspect of this was online collaboration with students and with colleagues. 

Back in 2006, we were trying out Writeboard http://writeboard.com. Since many of our colleagues had never used something like that before, I invited people to try out a collaborative page. That page still exists! If you go to the Collaborative Writing document that I started in 2008 at http://123.writeboard.com/19fb2cf0f68038b98/login, you can still login using the password: collabwrite.  

Knowing how reluctant readers of blogs are to comment on posts (here's a post on another blog of mine about just that), I suspected that there was a good chance that the response to the would be underwhelming - and it was just that.

But 8 years have passed and using tools like Zoho http://www.zoho.com and Google Docs http://docs.google.com for collaboration are more common and Writeboard seems primitive. I feel that also is the way wikis are viewed, though collaborative websites still aren't easy to do.





I use Dropbox as often as shared Google files. We have not gone "paperless" despite hearing that battlecry for about 25 years, but it is rare that I email a file or hand someone a paper document to read and make comments. Getting feedback from a larger group, keeping track of everyone’s copies, and maintaining one "final version" is really difficult if you're not collaborating online in the cloud.

With services like Dropbox, you share your file with several people at once, and they can leave comments on specific parts and maintain one version. 

Now, Dropbox Paper is another way to help teams create collaborative docs and share important information. They also have a new Paper mobile apps for iOS and Android that you can use for on-the-go access.

It is progress that online collaboration is much more common with researchers and writers who also share email, files and meet live with web conferencing.

You can ask people - perhaps your students - to upload files to your Dropbox even if they don't have an account.

I keep telling people to sign up for a free Dropbox account if only to protect important files (docs, photos, whatever) with automatic backup. Usually, people do it AFTER their hard drive crashes, which is like buying insurance after the accident.