Learning Analytics - Improve teaching through targeted collection and processing of learning-related data
New research project funded by Campus QPLUS
"The aim of our project is to provide learners and teachers with continuous, individually prepared feedback on their learning status and learning process throughout the semester. We will use learning analytics methods to automatically generate feedback for students and lecturers," says Dr. Sebastian Hobert, explaining his new project "Learning Analytics for Students and Lecturers: Individual and Aggregated Feedback in Large Events". It will be funded within the framework of the initiative "Göttingen Campus QPLUS" (call for proposals "Freiraum für Lehrende zur Entwicklung von innovativen Lehr- und Lernkonzepten" 2019) from January 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020.The research associate of the Chair of Application Systems and E-Business is carrying out the project together with Florian Berens from the Chair of Quantitative Methods and Statistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences.
"Feedback is an important starting point for both learners and teachers to further develop their own teaching and learning processes. In large events, however, it is often difficult for both sides to obtain the feedback they need for their own further development," Hobert continues. Due to the large number of participants in many courses, personal contact between teachers and learners is very limited.
The teachers therefore know the individual students too little to be able to give individual feedback and the students often do not dare to give feedback to the teacher. Teachers must therefore rely on their sense of their students' learning levels in order to adapt further teaching content accordingly. Students, on the other hand, must independently assess how well they have understood the learning content by reflecting on their understanding of the lecture and evaluating their success in completing exercises.
In order to improve this situation, this feedback will in future be generated automatically by the application of Learning Analytics methods and passed on to the students and their lecturers. "By Learning Analytics we mean the targeted collection, processing, analysis and visualisation of learning-related data. Learning Analytics pursues the goal not only of analysing learning, but also of constantly playing back the (interim) results of the analysis into the teaching in order to continuously improve actual teaching," explains Hobert. Within the framework of the research project, a corresponding Learning Analytics tool is to be created. The funds raised will therefore be used in particular to recruit student assistants to support the scientists in developing the concept, implementing it technically and testing it in two courses.
In addition, Sebastian Hobert and Florian Berens would like to set up a Learning Analytics consultation hour in which individual learning advice is offered based on the results of the analysis: "The aim here is to ensure that students are continuously supported in their learning processes on the one hand and that teachers are given the opportunity to improve the lectures on a weekly basis based on the feedback.
Information about Göttingen Campus QPLUS you will find here.