Academic Analytics: A New Tool for a New Era

OPENING THE DOOR TO NEW POSSIBILITIES THROUGH                        THE USE OF ANALYTICS

       The use of technology in education had changed over the years exploring methods to improve learning. Watching a video by John Campbell, I came across a very interesting comparison. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there… It does not make a sound. How about if we talk about students? What happens of a student who is struggling in class and the teacher is not aware in any way what can he/she do if there is no sound. Today with the emergence of academic analytics, an exciting set of tools is being built to improve student learning. The institutions and IT specialists should take advantage of this data to track students’ failure and progress. I found an interesting and effective way to track students’ progress watching a video on educause.edu.  Perdue University tracks students performance using signals with different colors. If students have bad performance, they are shown signals to care for their performance.

    Academic analytics provides data and solutions for universities. With its help, universities get objective data that administrators use during the decision-making processes. This also contributes the universities in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses, observe performance of the students and identify some areas that need some improvements.

     My friend and I had the chance to deal with and understand academic analytics more thoroughly. Last year we did a poster presentation about the use of Moodle as an e-learning tool in Academic Writing Course. We were given the opportunity to track data on AWC via Google Analytics and Moodle Reports. 

It gave us the chance to learn which pages of the course were viewed most and the least by the students, the average visit duration, course views, the bounce rate, the technology they used mostly to enter Moodle, etc. 

This really gave a big data for our research which helped us to make implications about the AWC course and areas to be improved. The data tracking method was really useful for our institution to evaluate and support students’ academic performance and track their progress.