A Blackboard study, but with implications for all LMSs (you'll need a Chronicle account) http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Clicks-From-70000/237704/?key=3E28u5V_kVLLINFdIng14ArzhfOapBHcCtJa0JA29Cl6h1B4PR-W…
Fortunately, rgibson1, I was able to view that article without a Chronicle account (when I clicked through, it said I got 24-hour access). The article mentions something about "an existential victory for grade-grubbers," but my admittedly unscientific and strictly subjective observation reveals a very different interpretation. At the end of every semester, when I'm about to give out F grades to a handful of students, I always have to go through to their user activity because I am required to report their last activity along with the grade. And almost invariably, I see that the students have clicked on almost nothing in their courses except for the Grades tab, which they have accessed literally hundreds of times. My experience refutes the article's assertion that there is a correlation between checking grades and getting good ones.
So again, just from my personal perspective, I'm finding it hard to get any kind of weighty meaning from those click numbers. I'd rather spend my time in the continuous process of evaluating my assessment designs against mastery measurements rather than counting clicks.
I read that article yesterday. When I read the correlation about looking at grades and having good grades, I thought, "Yes, and skinny people get on the scale, while overweight people don't." That's because skinny people know that they'll get good news, so they know what they'll see before they even get on the scale. It's a real chicken-and-egg question and one reason why we've never included factors like "time spent in course" in our analysis. A student spending a long time in the course could be mastering a lot of the material, or be so clueless that they are clicking on everything. It's really tough to find risk factors that are truly objective measures.
I just received the full report this morning. If interested, go to: LMS and Big Data.pdf - Google Drive
Ignore the competitor stuff. There's a little bit of product pimping, but not bad....
stefaniesanders @Chris_Munzo I especially found interesting the the following excerpt:
"Students who spend more time than the average clicking around the "content" section of a course, where notes and PowerPoint slides are often kept, are slightly less likely to get a high grade. "Perhaps students who understand the material and students who are well prepared don’t need to spend a lot of time learning the material," says Mr. Whitmer, the Blackboard researcher."
Another blanket "guess" that in no way takes into account the possibility of poor design and/or course content being what confused the students and the possibility that some of those confused students stopped clicking due to the poor design or content and pursued outside sources such as YouTube to learn the content and that others had to continue to review the content pages to try to make any sense of them. It also does not take into account the possibility that those students who did not click as much might have been involved in study groups that helped them better learn the content so that no one student in that group had to click on the links many times. There is also the possibility of academic dishonesty being a reason for the need for a limited number of visits to content pages (no need to learn the content if you have already bought the answers to the exams).
It seems to me that while the collection of Big Data may prove useful for making some decisions in education, there are some, especially those who have a vested interest in the field that are pushing this without offering much proof of what can actually be determined with the information.
In our old LMS, we created a dashboard that was the first thing the students would see when they logged in. The dashboard put that grade and their attendance in front of them. The only way to avoid it was to not log in.
What we actually found was that it didn't cause the students to perform better just because they knew what their grade was, but that a lot of them actually tried to become better students. Watching social media sites, students were stating they couldn't go out with friends that night because they were in the red. (The dashboard was color coded.) We have since, left that LMS of course, and now we are working to get the up-to-date student grades incorporated on the course cards in Canvas. Hopefully we will continue to see the students improve their study habits.
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