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Tag: Data

Studiosity: It Works!

Photo of entrance to London Campus
Photo of the entrance to our London Campus

It sometimes feels like Studiosity has taken over my life over the past couple of years, but it works! And I have the data to prove it. Some analysis recently completed after our first full year of usage showed clear correlation between student success, as measured by progression and outcomes, and engagement with the Studiosity service. I can’t exactly share University data of course, but I was recently interviewed by Studiosity about this work and a news article has now been published on their website about it.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2022

Photo of the Owl microphone and camera in action
Stock photo of the Owl mic

And lo! November 2022 did bring forth the first, proper, ALT North East User Group since The Before Times. Though we did have a catch-up meeting in January to check-in and talk about how the pandemic has affected us all.

I was unable to make any of the management meetings to help organise and set the agenda, and so was duly punished by being putting up first to give me now almost routine talk about how our pilot year with Studiosity has gone.

Next up was Newcastle University and how they have rolled out digital assessment. Interestingly, they made a decision not to implement any kind of online proctoring software over the pandemic, a decision I very much support. They have been using, and are now scaling up, the use of Inspera for in-person exams. This was chosen over others for its ability to save local copies of exams – which it does every 6 seconds – as a contingency against network outage, and which in extreme cases can be retrieved from the computer as an encrypted file and uploaded on the students’ behalf. They are using a bring-your-own-device model, with power supply available for around 10% of the exam room capacity, and a laptop loan scheme available for 5%, which have been sufficient to cover them. For improved convenience, they are now looking at providing portable power banks rather than running extension cables around the room.

Next, my old muckers from Northumbria talked about their digital literacy scheme which sees TEL colleagues mentoring staff on digital technologies, and an expanded IT Place which now features TEL as well as IT staff, supported by a range of asynchronous content with certificates for staff who complete set courses. They are looking at digital badges to replace / complement this moving forwards.

After lunch, Durham talked about their experience of dual-mode teaching, including the use of Owl telepresence devices, as featured in the pic above which I gratuitously pinched from their website (please don’t sue, I have no money). It was an interesting experience, mixed. A conclusion from the learning technologies team was that they were great for meetings and small rooms, but the mics and cameras weren’t up to the job in larger teaching spaces. That didn’t stop their IT department from purchasing them en masse and kitting out every room though! Ah, classic IT.

Finally, we ended with a roundtable discussion on the use of student data. Again, Newcastle I feel are ahead of the curve here in banning the use of predictive analytics outright. Durham talked about their experience of the Blackboard feature which allows automated messages to be sent to students based on performance – they turned it off. They felt it was problematic for student motivation as the messages didn’t provide sufficient (any?) contextual information for students.

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Cyber Security and Data Protection

Strangely enough, on the day that GDPR came into effect the University released a compulsory online module on Cyber Security and Data Protection for all staff. I procrastinated so only completed it today, with the excuse that I had already attended a number of briefings on GDPR over the past couple of months. It was fine, as far as these things go, but I didn’t really learn anything new. As would be expected of someone in my industry I’m already well versed in issues such as privacy, malware, hacking, password security, etc.

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General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Awareness

The GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, and nothing at all to do with the former German Democratic Republic, is the new regulations coming in to replace the Data Protection Act of 1998, bringing with it much firmer requirements for organisations to store data safely and appropriately, and harsher penalties for breaches. The GDPR will apply to all organisations holding data on EU citizens so it will apply to the university regardless of Brexit. It was actually a very useful session that has made me think about the types of thing I and my team store, and how most of it isn’t really necessary. I feel purge may be coming.

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ALT Annual Survey Results 2015

ALT has published the report and data from their second annual survey which can be dowloaded here. Interesting reading as they now have comparative data from last year’s survey so you can see the trends and changes.

No signs of the monolithic VLE going anywhere just yet, and interest in the field of data and learning analytics is continuing to grow. I was a little surprised to see open badges so far down the list, but as a colleague in another department said to me a few days ago, employers don’t know what they are or how to value them, and as a consequence students just aren’t interested.

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Enterprise Reporting

After our regular conference call with Pearson the team had an informal training session from a member of their Enterprise Reporting team. This came out of a problem I had a couple of weeks ago when I ran a simple report to list all units and items within a given module space and only got four results from a course which had six units and a couple of dozen items. We discovered that the items that were returned were the gradable items, even though the option to select only gradable items was not selected. So the question was why it wasn’t working as expected and returning all results. I don’t have a detailed explanation, but I did learn that there is what I would describe as a ‘quirk’ with Enterprise Reporting that means it only likes reports that include a measurement of some kind. Adding ‘Activity Minutes’ to my problem report resolved the issue.

We got some other good things out of the training too. A greater understanding of how nodes work and how they relate to courses and students, and with that a realisation that we cannot rely on these to get reports on what we want, which is which faculty or department a student belongs to, but we do now have a plan to use one of the extended user property fields as a custom field that will serve this purpose for us. And finally we got a data dictionary which will be extremely useful.

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Information Governance

A whistle-stop tour covering all aspects of information governance, including the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, information assurance, information security, copyright and intellectual property, records management and IT security. The training also covered how these inform the development of the University’s policies and procedures.

After the session I collared the trainers to suggest turning their training materials into a self-contained online course which could be made available for all staff to complete in their own time, an idea which went down very well.

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