Education Analytics and Its Role in Effective Functioning of Distance Education
On the 13th of October, 2016, Stephen Kerr, Professor of Education of the College of Education at the University of Washington, gave a lecture to the staff and guests of SESL. The Professor was talking about the role of education analytics in effective functioning of distance education, and how online courses can compensate for the shortcomings of full-time education, with the University of Washington as an example.
This educational institution has a long history and excellent reputation for academic performance. The university was founded in 1861 and currently ranks 15th in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. However the university remains a fairly conservative in the area of digitalization of education, and online courses get included into the educational process very slowly. The lecturers prefer to keep the traditional style of education, which includes mandatory lectures and seminars within the university walls. However there are large groups of students who cannot devote themselves to full-time education, so called “atypical students”. They are adults with jobs, children, parents or other relatives who require care. For them, the existence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is their only opportunity to receive higher education.
Stephen Kerr and his colleagues from the University of Washington, with a support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are developing a system that would allow providing centralized assistance for the students reading open online courses. One of the main components of this system is a regular survey of students, as well as using the course data in order to help students in their successful completing the course program without dropping out.
For this project, the researchers have analyzed data on two distance learning programs of the University of Washington, "Education in early childhood" (program for future employees of American kindergartens) and "Integrated Social Sciences".
The biggest problem faced by the respondents of the online programs was maintaining the balance between their family life and work. About 25% respondents were dissatisfied with this aspect of their distance education. Also it was found that students find it more convenient to do their homework at the start of a working week and not at its end, as commonly believed.
It’s interesting to note that a comparison between the students from full-time education programs and the distance learning students has revealed that the MOOC students feel more support from the university teachers. For example, full-time students gave an average score of 4.7 points out of 6 for accessibility of teachers, while the distance learning students gave it 5.7 points out of 6. The study also touched on the university teachers. As it turned out, the teachers find online courses more favorable in such aspects as deeper involvement of the students in the educational process and tracking their progress.
Predictive analytics can be a very useful tool for improving online courses. Some American universities plan to introduce a new post of an analytic expert, with the responsibility to provide help for students of online courses and to monitor the success of such programs and the effectiveness of the learning process basing on data analysis.
By Denis Bulygin and Ksenia Antoshko