How do I know my learning environment is effective?
There are several ways that learning environments can be measured for their effectiveness. To begin with, you will need to be clear about what you are measuring and how you define effectiveness. For example, are you measuring behavioural patterns of student engagement with your material? Or are you more concerned about whether students understand the material? Student performance in assessments is another measure but due to the highly dynamic nature of learning environments, it is difficult to determine effectiveness based on comparing grades from year to year.
Learning analytics is a discipline that can help provide you with the analytical tools to investigate questions related to the effectiveness of your learning environment. One of the first objectives is to determine the dimension of student activity or learning that you want to explore.
What can it tell me?
Student engagement in your learning environment
Behavioural data can be used to track your students’ study patterns. This data can be used to intervene if study patterns are unlikely to lead to successful outcomes in highly self-directed modes of learning.
Student cognitive engagement in your learning environment
- It is important to embed tools to capture measures of cognitive engagement in your learning environment – this requires planning.
- Quizzes attached to videos or learning is one way of tracking student understanding with learning material.
Effectiveness of learning designs
Data can be analysed to measure whether the pedagogical intention behind learning designs aligns with student behaviour. For example, you might be interested in exploring student activity related to a discussion board and whether students are sharing knowledge effectively. Data related to student activity can be used to modify the features of tasks including announcements to students, group formation or breaking tasks into more manageable components.
How do I do it?
Track student access and interaction in vUWS?
This module will provide you with all the basic information about the tools that are available in vUWS to help you track student engagement and activity in vUWS.
Track student interaction with content and student engagement in vUWS?
This module will provide you with all the basic information about the tools that are available in vUWS to help you track student interaction with content and student engagement in vUWS.
Want to know more? To read more on the relationship between learning analytics and learning:
Lodge, J.M., Corrin, L. What data and analytics can and do say about effective learning . npj Science Learn 2, 5 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-017-0006-5
