Learning analytics (beta)

Data explorer provides an inexpensive solution that enables you to obtain a series of rapid, flexible visualisations of data about your curricula and your students’ learning activities.

Benefits

• Identify at-risk students so you can provide interventions to maximise their chances of success
• Manage information about individual student interventions and meetings, and electronically logging it side by side with that student’s data and visualisations
• Reach a clearer understanding of how the curriculum is functioning so you can plan and implement enhancements

Study goal is a mobile app for Apple iOS and Android that gives each student a window not only on their academic progression but on their personal learning analytics.

Students can review data about their engagement with learning activities such as lecture attendance, online learning and assessments and use it to set learning targets and log their progress towards these.

Benefits

• Enables students to take control of their own learning
• Simple, cost-effective way to monitor attendance

“Study goal has assisted Abertay in beginning to address how students understand the interrelationships between attendance, engagement and academic effort in supporting them to achieve their personal academic goals.”
James Nicholson, director of student services, Abertay University

A robust store for student and engagement data is essential for any learning analytics projects your university or college decides to undertake.

Our learning data hub is a storage solution that will save you money on hosting and managing an in-house solution. It also enables integration with a growing catalogue of products from commercial vendors working with us and providing plug-ins for the transfer of big data.

Benefits

• Hosted on secure, resilient servers in the UK and EU using Amazon Web Services
• Uses open standards and APIs so that you and your suppliers can access data easily without the need for costly add-ons
• Infinite data storage
• Compatible with a growing range of data sources

We offer a learning analytics purchasing service to support you in making better-informed decisions about procurement and to simplify the buying process.

We test the solutions offered by participating suppliers to make sure they conform with our learning analytics architecture; organisations can then use our service to save time and money on procurement.

Benefits

• Fully electronic; simplifies procurement for buyers and sellers
• Reduces time taken to specify, buy and implement solutions
• Provides help (if needed) from our specialist procurement staff to develop an accurate and comprehensive statement of requirements
• Helps to ensure that the marketplace remains competitive in terms of quality
• Ensures that service users have access to current pricing
• Provides users with immediate access to innovation in the market – vendors can join the service at any time (subject to our due diligence checks)

Our discovery service can be valuable for any learning organisation that has not yet embarked on its first learning analytics project.

We can provide a two-day discovery visit as part of our consultancy services. The visit starts with a briefing from the IT director or other main contact, followed by a workshop with key stakeholders to set goals and objectives for the analytics project. A week later we’ll provide a comprehensive report summarising the discussions, assessing the institution’s readiness for learning analytics and proposing next steps.

Within our discovery lite service, sessions typically take a single day, and enable the institution to tackle an area of concern such as ethics or legal issues. Again, their report will summarise the issues and suggest a way forward.

We'll help you get started with the service as you select, clean and integrate data sources, work with the predictive models, configure the products and then view and interpret the data. We can also cover planning and evaluation of pilot projects.

Intervention planning

We have worked with several UK universities, colleges and skills providers on planning interventions with learners, and conducted research among many others both here and overseas to uncover best practice. We’ll share our insights with you to inform development of your own organisational plans.

Changing organisational culture

Many studies show that people issues make or break a learning analytics project more often than technical ones. Our consultants will help your organisation to understand these issues and remove barriers to implementation.