Adapting Learning Resources

Shape and change the available learning resources to suit student needs.

Overview

By using learning analytics, course content and learning resource provision can be adjusted during a session in order to better support student learning. Learning analytics can also inform effective learning design and arrangements in subsequent subject offerings. Content expertise alone is not enough to ensure student engagement and success. Having a good idea of what areas your students are mastering or what areas they may be struggling with, and at which point in the subject, are very important for teaching online. Data analytics can help provide you with these kinds of insights to prompt appropriate feedback, inform active interventions and make responsive adaptations to learning resources.

Engagement

As a primary function, this strategy seeks to improve learner engagement with subject content by seeking to measure its effectiveness and adapting the resources. Using analytics allows a student-centric understanding of the value of your digital content (e.g., What content is being used by students? How are they using the content?, etc.). This practice can also assist in developing learner-teacher engagement by providing data that can put you in touch with learners’ activities and progress. This may well lead you to make informed during-session changes that improve the effectiveness of content or learning activities for learners.

In Practice

Guide

In simple terms, learning analytics is about better understanding of the online learning and teaching process, and interpreting student data to improve learning experiences and success. Analytics can be presented as summaries, visualisations and analyses of student data that could improve learning in multiple ways (Cooper, 2012; Long & Siemens, 2011). Student data is the trace data or data trails of students recorded within a number of online systems used at CSU, like Interact2, CSU Replay, Adobe Connect and Smart Sparrow.

Content analytics uses collected data for analysing different forms of learning content in order to understand or improve learning resources or activities. Data provides detailed visibility into courses (e.g. subject structure, digital content used) and can be used to discover student use and engagement patterns for content areas and core learning resources (Lockyer, Heathcote & Dawson, 2013, p. 1441). Any actionable insights then form the basis for making adjustments to learning resources and support (e.g. scaffolding) during a current session, and to inform learning resources and support provision in subsequent subject offerings. The end result is learner pathways that are more responsive to concept learning difficulties or to knowledge enhancement.

Analytics data can be augmented with information from students gathered, for example, from a subject feedback forum, or later in the Subject Experience Survey. Quantitative data, combined with qualitative information from students as to what areas they struggled with, allow teachers to make timely adjustments during a session and plan for more effective learning design arrangements in future subject offerings.

By way of an example, using Interact2 Site Analytics will provide you with self-service access to Content Access Statistics. This is one of five standard Site Analytics reports with a focus on learning, teaching and student engagement within a subject site. The Site Analytics reports are not static end-of-session historic reports, but instead enable a close-to-real time view of learner engagement and performance.

Adopting a data-informed adaptive approach to teaching can be realised in a variety of ways:

• Augment existing resources with additional material by injecting additional sources of information.
• Use existing rich media resources, like YouTube videos, to add explain topic areas. Video and visual resources can often help explain and illustrate difficult concept in different ways.
• Link to other sources that describe the topic in different ways to create Choral Explanations so that students can find an explanation that relates to their way of thinking.
• Present students with options and different ways to access learning materials. Some students may prefer to read, some on screen and some on paper, others may prefer to listen or watch their resources. Data analysis can help identify student preferences.
• Create supplementary resources yourself, like impromptu videos, to provide feedback or that react and respond to student queries, questions and misunderstandings.

Tools

Data analytics are available in a number of systems used at CSU:

• Interact2 Site Analytics are available within the Control Panel menu of each subject site, select Evaluation, then the Site Analytics link.
• Interact2 Analytics for Tests and Surveys are also a helpful tool for creating and moderating these tasks.
• If you post videos on YouTube you can utilise the analytics available in the platform. YouTube has a resource called Measure your success with YouTube Analytics available from the Creator Academy. Another useful resource has been developed by Marc Bullard and available from his website.
• Smart Sparrow also provides good analytics and more information has been provided by their Adaptive Learning & Teaching team

Additional Resources