OnTask

Connecting student data with personalized feedback

Abstract

Universities are increasingly being expected to ensure student success while at the same time delivering larger courses.  Within this environment, the provision of effective and timely feedback to students and creating opportunities for genuine engagement between teachers and students is increasingly difficult if not impossible for many instructors, despite the known value and importance of feedback (Timperley & Hattie, 2007) and instructor presence (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2010).  Similar to other tertiary institutions, the University of Auckland has adopted various technology-enhanced learning approaches and technologies, including learning analytics in an attempt to support teaching and learning at scale.  The increased use of educational technology to support learning provides a variety of data sources for teachers to provide personalised feedback and improve the overall learning experience for students.  This workshop is targeted to teachers interested in the use of learning data to provide personalized support to learners.  Participants will have a hands-on opportunity to use the open-source tool OnTask (Pardo, et al. 2018) within some common teaching scenarios with a synthetically generated data set.  The facilitators will also share and discuss how OnTask is currently being used in universities to support student experience, teaching practice and course design.  As this is a hands-on workshop, participants must bring a laptop computer to work with the online tool and the prepared scenarios. 

References

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2010). The first decade of the community of inquiry framework: A retrospective. The internet and higher education, 13(1-2), 5-9.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.

Pardo, A., Bartimote-Aufflick, K., Shum, S. B., Dawson, S., Gao, J., Gaševic, D., Leichtweis, S., Liu, D., Martínez-Maldonado, R., Mirriahi, N. and Moskal, A. C. M. (2018). OnTask: Delivering Data-Informed, Personalized Learning Support Actions. Journal of Learning Analytics, 5(3), 235-249.