After a productive and interesting 10 months, the Learning Analytics Report Card (LARC) project is entering its final stage. The project has sought to develop a student-focussed form of educational data analysis, and promote a critical understanding of the increasing use of analytics in education. Following successful pilots on MSc Digital Education courses Understanding Learning in the Online Environment and Research Methods, we are now analysing the resulting data and working towards a final structured evaluation with participants. This week we have also added some new features to the LARC:
- Choice options (attendance, engagement, social interaction etc) now appear underneath the report title. This helps with the archiving of reports, so users are reminded about which choices were selected for a given report.
- We've added some sentiment analysis related to the 'social interaction' option, so an additional sentence has been added to the report, commenting on the tone of forums posts.
- We've added a rough breakdown of the numbers used underneath the report. This shows some of the data used to generate the text of the report and displays the user variable as well as the group average, allowing users to understand a bit of the context in which particular report statements have been made.
Following a testing period with the student representatives and pilot participants, as well as the final advisory board meeting in early May, the various technical elements of the LARC will be reviewed and final specification established. This process should generate a viable version of the LARC that can continue to be used on the MSc Digital Education programme and beyond.
And finally, early analysis of the pilot data is revealing some potentially interesting insights.