Learning and assessment environment that offers learning analytics

•Assessments and Activities in Online Learning

The “peak” learning technologies that sufficiently support the learning processes, i.e., information-rich data sources – like haptic media and tangible computing, mobile platforms and wearable computing, augmented reality, educational games computer vision, and speech recognition – that allow for the identification of new, suitable measures of learning and success (e.g., affect, attention, attitudes, community structure, degrees of competence, expectations, participation, satisfaction, social dynamics, attendance, and retention).

Every “click” within a digital learning environment may be valuable actual information that can be tracked and analyzed. Every simple or more complex action within such environments can be isolated, identified, and classified through computational methods into meaningful patterns.

In general, learning, and particularly higher-order learning, requires opportunities for reflection, informed repetition, self-evaluation, pauses, and even the preparedness to make mistakes and learn from them.

•Four types of online learning assessment techniques are commonly used. They include Comprehensive-type, discussion board, reflective-focused, and project-based assessments. These assessments can be used both as a formative assessment (activity) or summative assessment.

Comprehension-type assessment : 
•These are selected response type of assessment.
•In this type of assessment, students are usually given choices to select one or more answers from many.
•Comprehension type assessments aim for students to understand remember and/or memorize concepts and ideas (Van den Broek et al., 2005).
•They are mostly meant for formative type assessment as they are quick tools to gather the information that can be used to monitor student learning and make necessary adjustments (Cornelius, 2013; Wormeli, 2007; Tomlinson, 1999).
•These includes assessment such as multiple-choice, true-false, matching ranging, etc.
 

Discussion board : 
•Discussion boards are well-suited for promoting collaboration and interaction among online learners.
•According to Shuey, (2002), these can be used to assess skills such as reasoning, collaboration, negotiation, argumentation, and debating (Clark, Sampson, Weinberger, & Erkens, 2007) and teamwork etc.
•This method of assessment promotes active learning and also allows the student to support each other in the form of a learning community and therefore assists developing multiple perspectives (Gikandi et al., 2011; Mackey & Evans, 2014)
 

Reflection-focused assessments:
•These assessments focus not only on the correct answers of a given problem, but they emphasize the thought processes that lead to that answer (Frederick, 2002).
•These are assessments for which students are expected to articulate more elaborate responses to questions related to the skills and knowledge learned in the course.
•These assessments allow students to formulate their responses using theoretical and practical knowledge. Examples of these assessments include short answers, essays, minute papers, research papers, reflection papers, etc.
•Cumulative assessments such as e-portfolios can also promote student's reflective skills in addition to helping them connect different learning events and opportunities that happen during a course.
 

Project-based assessment
•Project-based learning (PBL) organizes learning around a project and involves answering authentic, real-life challenging questions involving students in the constructive investigation (Thomas, 2000). Assessing project-based learning is referred to as a project-based assessment.
•These assessments include presentations and products. These types of products require manual grading based on rubrics.
•Examples of such skills include the ones requiring students to integrate different skills to create a product (a business plan, or lesson plan) or related to oral communication (i.e interacting with the audience, keeping eye contact, tone of voice, etc…) which cannot be assessed from written work since they require live or recorded demonstration.
•Projects based assessment provides an opportunity for students to work in groups or individually, and the interaction among group members can be analyzed as part of this assessment.
•Examples of project-based assessment in this sample course included using a live binder to compile a list of 20 websites that they can use in their future classroom, using more to create a flyer on computer security for the students and parents, etc.
 

How it will work

Learning Analytics : How it work

Different techniques used to present data 
•Tableau© for Quantitative Data Analysis and Visualization
•ManyEyes© for Qualitative Data Analysis Visualization

What are its effects?
•Furthermore, the information and feedback provided through the use of learning Analytics data for assessment in online and blended learning could be of great importance to all stakeholders.
•As an instructor, taking the time to review the learning analytics data on student activity and assessment was meaningful though the class size was small.
•It helped identify the students who were very active in the online class and were spending a lot more time in the Learning Management System.
•It also helped identify students who were not as active and who I needed to reach out to both in terms of performance and engagement.
•Analyzing the data helped with the implementation of similar courses and in designing the assessments in a way that is more beneficial to the students.
•As an instructor, if teacher noticed that there was a student who was struggling with a particular module, teacher reached out to the student to provide additional support.
•Teacher was also able to reach out to inactive students early on, rather than waiting until the end of the semester to provide support and develop remediation strategies.
•While instructors may use such information for effective online teaching, students can also use it to enhance their learning.
•Instructional designers may use this information to recommend best practices in online course design.
•Administrators may use this information to design successful online programs.
•Educational researchers may use this framework to analyze data from the various online assessments within the learning analytics framework.
•Bringing together these points of view will help improve online teaching and learning.
•Future directions for this study will be to conduct research on the effectiveness of these tools.
•The authors also plan to implement the various data analyses techniques in large enrollment classes in the future.

References : 

1) Cornelius, K.(2013). Formative Assessment Made Easy: Templates for Collecting Daily Data in Incl: EBSCOhost. Teaching Exceptional Children, 45(5), 14–21.

2) Tomlinson,C .A.(1999).The differentiated classroom:Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria,VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

3) Shuey, S. (2002). Assessing online learning in higher education. Journal of Instruction Delivery Systems, 16(2), 13-18.

4) Clark, D., Sampson, V., Weinberger, A., & Erkens, G. (2007). Analytic Frameworks for Assessing Dialogic Argumentation in Online Learning, Educational Psychology Review, 19(3), 343–374.

5) Gikandi, J. W., Morrow, D., & Davis, N. E. (2011). Online formative assessment in higher education: A review of the literature, Computers & Education, 57(4), 2333–2351.

6) Mackey, J., & Evans, T. (2014). Interconnecting networks of practice for professional learning, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3), 1–10.

7) Martin, Florence and Ndoye, Abdou, U sing Learning Analytics to Assess Student Learning in Online Courses, J ournal of University T eaching & Learning Practice, 13(3), 2016. Available at:http://ro. uow . edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss3/7