My Learning Analytics

My Learning Analytics (lovingly referred to as MyLA) provides students deeper insights into their own learning. MyLA ingests Caliper event streams and joins them with performance data to provide the students visualizations representing their participation in the course in relation to their peers. For instance, students are provided a ranked view of the most popular course content and can filter that content by performance groups (e.g. students scoring 90-100%, 80-89%, etc). If I, as the student, have viewed the file, it will be highlighted and display details such as the last time I opened it. There is a direct link to the file from the visualization, so I can quickly review popular content I may have missed. In this way, our design focuses on mastery of content and learning goals and not just grade performance. Other capabilities include a learning activity timeline, assignment planning tool, and grade distribution visualization.

Design Approach

MyLA is not yet-another-app students have to wrestle with, but rather a set of thoughtfully tailored visualizations, presented inline with their normal instructional workflows, available where they are most impactful. In many ways, MyLA is the remedy to what research has suggested is the flawed approach of overwhelming students with data dashboards that are difficult to interpret and don’t provide a clear path to improving learning behaviors. Our design focuses on mastery of content and goals and not just grade performance. Key to their effectiveness, these visualizations are not stacked in a dashboard the student has to be conditioned to look at and trained to interpret; the visualizations are imbedded within the LMS’ existing, assignment, content, and grading workflows, so the intent has context, is less ambiguous, and nudges students towards improved learning behaviors. MyLA is the un-dashboard!

Data Informed Learning

Over the past several years, the University of Michigan has earnestly invested in a data-informed learning strategy that leans heavily on the Caliper learning analytics specification and open learning tool standards as key pillars for success. We have been working closely with our technology partners, local innovators, and academic consortia on instrumentation of learning tools through Caliper and in building a standards-based data analytics infrastructure. We are proud to introduce the first service built on this new foundation for digital learning: My Learning Analytics.

Faculty Collaboration

This effort was a partnership between research faculty in the University of Michigan’s School of Information, School of Education, and Information technology Services. The design was informed by the body of research on the efficacy of student-facing data dashboards and the observed shortcomings with past learning analytics products. MyLA leverages the Unizin Data Platform, a consortial effort to develop shared, standards-based, digital learning infrastructure and their are preliminary discussions on piloting this tool across that consortium.

My Learning Analytics

We'd love to hear from you. If you have suggestions or question, please reach out to myla-help@umich.edu .