Crunching the numbers

• Article 9 of 15
• EducationInvestor, September 2012

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For as long as there have been teachers, there has been some form of analysis of students' progress. Whether it was a viva, exams or a process of continual assessment, teachers and schools have wanted to know how students have been performing, either to help them with areas they're having difficulty with or to fine-tune the course and its materials. But with the advent of modern ICT, distance and online learning has come the first tentative steps into something more: 'learning analytics', a term that encompasses a variety of technologies designed to understand student behaviour to a far greater extent than before and to act on that information, potentially automatically.

The aim is that by analysing student behaviour, both online and offline, it will be possible to know how they're really faring on a course. With many organisations seeing non-trivial drop-out rates from courses or that live or die on the ratings of their students, the idea of knowing when students are having problems, even if the students haven't mentioned them - and, equally, knowing what to do to help them overcome those problems - could mean serious financial rewards, marketing opportunities and a better experience for students. Indeed, EDUCAUSE in the US has announced a major programme in partnership with the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and others that identifies learning analytics as one of five key areas for development, and the New Media Consortium of education technology experts predicts widespread adoption of learning analytics in the next four to five years.

However, as of yet, most forms of learning analytics are relatively basic compared to these ambitions. Virtual learning environments, such as Moodle and Blackboard, ship with dashboard systems that include web-analytics style views of pages seen, links clicked on and so on, but these are relatively basic, compared with ambitions for the field.

"They tackle the basic problems of the plumbing, but they're really just overviews for educators to look at of logs and clicks - they don't grant any real insight," says Simon Buckingham Shum, associate director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute and a member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), a collaboration between researchers and universities around the world.

Mark McCusker, whose company TextHelp is working on incorporating learning analytics technology into its own software, Fluency Tutor, agrees. "It's very early stages as a field - I tend to think of it as still in the labs." With 50,000 tests taken last year with Fluency Tutor, for example, McCusker says that TextHelp can use learning analytics to tell general trends in student performance and tell which students will progress to the next level in the next few months. But anything more is still in the testing stage and will only appear in the "generation after the next one".

Indeed, even organisations that should be able to benefit from learning analytics are balking at what they perceive as its relatively basic levels of insight. TLC Live!, a tutoring company that has now moved into online tutoring, has 6,000 hours of bespoke content that can be viewed by students. Being able to track how students progress through its site or how they respond to the content should give TLC the ability to fine-tune its courses. But, says the company's founder Simon Barnes, even though "online is where we expect the future to be", TLC is looking to maintain the human element as much as possible because it finds current learning analytics too clumsy.

"We have online assessments derived from our centre-based assessments. From these assessments, we can build up learning programmes - series of questions to identify which areas students have understood." With just a few pupils in each class, teachers have the time and resources to build individual learning plans based on those assessments, rather than to rely on computers.

More automated forms of tailoring for larger class sizes, as well as more sophisticated manually tailoring, may be possible with ePace's online assessment tool. Rather than tracking progress during a course, this allows both learners and teachers to discover students' abilities and preferred learning styles at the beginning of the course: do they respond better to the written word, audio information, videos or games? How good is their ability to focus? How good is their reading ability? Teachers, whether working online and offline, can then segment their classes so that each segment gets the kind of content they respond to best. "When you get 30 children through the door, it's hard to look into their minds," says Mary Blake, founder of ePace. "So if you can access the ePace class profile, look at the auditory memory profile and find there are six kids who find that difficult, you can give them what they need."

As of yet, the tool is still standalone, but the company is now working with Learning Platforms to incorporate it into its online learning platform, as well as with further education institutions to incorporate it into Moodle, so that customers can automatically serve course content to each student that is appropriate to the student's abilities.

Classroom Monitor, which started out "essentially as an ICT-based markbook", according to Chris Scarth, the company's commercial director, is also working to tailor content using learning analytics. "Teachers can link into things like TDS or the BBC, or paid for content and as they highlight and record progress against the National Curriculum or progress, they create a bank of teaching resources, some in the classroom or some for the students to work on independently." The company is partnering with universities to include content that can be used by the system. "It links number crunching and data to softer information. It's all about joining up all those different bits into one central hub that links content, assessment, data, tracking and everything else in one usable process"

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