Research Projects Focussing on Learning Analytics at Michigan
From slam
[edit] E2Coach
The Michigan Tailoring System is an open source software solution developed to customize public health communications. We are adapting MTS to optimize the learning experience in large gateway science courses. The E2Coach system will provide each student with an individualized interface to their class, one that will dynamically recognize their strengths and weaknesses, understand their motivations, and coach them through the course. All students will be better served when we more thoroughly tailor the approach each takes to achieving their learning goals, both high-risk students and those who most easily master the material.
More information on E2Coach can be found here.
[edit] Expanding ART to include student life course data
The Academic Reporting Toolkit (ART) is a web based tool created by Rob Wilke and the LSA IT committee around 2003. It provides access to enrollment histories, grade distributions, course connections, course grade pairings, and information about the correlation between standardized tests like the SAT and ACT and course performance. By accessing the data warehouse and wrapping up the results for users, ART provides push-button access to a large and rich historical data set. It has become a standard tool for many among the faculty and staff who are charged with keeping track of what’s happening in our classes.
The LSA Honors Program and the Comprehensive Studies program have joined forces in a new project, aimed at understanding the movement of students through the University across their entire undergraduate experience. For this project, we are constructing a tool which will allow us to identify a set of students and examine their entire progress through the campus. Our initial intent is to test the impact of programs like Honors and CSP on student outcomes. We plan to compare students in our programs to comparable students who are not, examining the courses they use to meet college requirements, concentrations they pursue, and level of success measured in various ways. More details are available in the original proposal here.
[edit] M-STEM Academy
The M-STEM Academy is designed to maximize the academic, personal, and professional success of students, with the goal of preparing them for the engineering global workforce. The M-STEM Academy spans the first two years and includes a pre-freshman summer transition program, customized advising, career guidance, academic learning enrichment activities, and assistance in obtaining a paid professional summer internship or research opportunity.
The USE Lab is working with the M-STEM Academy in order to supply mentors with analytic data displays and a type of early warning system that utilizes CTools and student records data in order to better inform academic advisors about when and how to engage their students as well as track upperclassmen who are no longer mandated to attend advising and guidance sessions.
