Report: LMS data applications to improve course outcomes
As schools tie more data into their analytics programmes and learning management systems (LMS), they are discovering new ways to use that information to support positive student outcomes. Campus Technology reports on eight ways colleges and universities are using analytics, which include: identifying faculty who are innovating in their classrooms and seeing positive results because of it; promoting student ownership of learning by making certain data available to them; and re-focussing faculty with the facts about their own courses and student behaviour to lead to better decision-making. Schools are also using analytics to focus on high-impact institutional goals and track progress; getting access to more data from external partners; and making the data more accessible to all parties, including faculty.

Data Analytics

How Data From Your LMS Can Impact Student Success

Higher ed IT leaders share 8 ways to make the best use of the data coming out of the campus learning management system.

This fall, Oral Roberts University (OK) issued Fitbits to on-campus students and Garmin vivofits to online students — part of the "whole person" philosophy at the Tulsa-based institution that urges students to be "well prepared" physically. The data generated by those activity trackers on movement, heart rate and sleep patterns drizzles automatically into the university's D2L gradebook in time for settling up midterm grades and finals. The results are displayed through D2L for faculty and students, just as if they were weekly quiz grades. The Garmin device, added CIO Mike Mathews, syncs with an online service that allows students to set goals and share progress with others.

Eventually, the campus will use the analytics to find out whether tracking the fitness data and making it visible gets students to move their bodies more, which is the goal, after all.

A stand-alone wearable wouldn't be nearly as compelling to Oral Roberts U if it didn't also tie right into D2L's analytics product, Insights, which the university uses for data mining and reporting. "We're 100 percent leveraged on D2L," said Mathews. That means people log into D2L first to gain entry for every other application they use for learning and instruction — the LMS, digital textbooks, the e-portfolio. "Everything is centered around the universe of D2L."

That's the way a lot of the best analytics work in higher ed right now: Small streams of data pour into and out of the learning management system to tell administrators, teachers and students things that can make a difference in their decision-making. Here's how others are making the best use of analytics available within the LMS to influence student success.

Adopt a Tool That Anybody Can Use

When the University of Maryland, Baltimore County attempted to implement an early analytics effort in PeopleSoft, which had provided its administrative systems, the university struggled for a year and a half to wrangle analytics before it finally looked up and noticed what was happening about seven miles northeast of campus. Coppin State University had become an early customer of iStrategy, a company that developed data warehousing and business intelligence software for higher education.

"We brought that product in, and we realized that it ran circles around what we were doing with the technology that we had bought from PeopleSoft," recalled Jack Suess, CIO and vice president of IT. The university built a "robust reporting and analytics environment" to answer real-time questions, and the heads of enrollment management and institutional research began carrying laptops to meetings just so they could answer questions on the fly.

Compare that to the previous scenario: A question would be posed and submitted to Institutional Research, and two weeks later a response would come back. Then a meeting would be scheduled. Four weeks later the meeting would convene, the answer would be given and inevitably somebody would raise a hand to ask a follow-on question. And the painful cycle would start again.

UMBC quickly directed its new analytics capabilities to the area of student success — which involved Blackboard, the campus LMS. And when Blackboard acquired iStrategy in early 2011, all the better, as far as UMBC was concerned. Now the technology serves up the "gold standard" used by the institution in its official reporting to the federal Department of Education and the state Higher Education Commission.