Lab Research

For college students, success starts with choosing the classes that help them achieve their educational goals. In general, this means going through the course catalog and reading many course descriptions, which alone do not provide students with enough information. Our proposed solution, Stanislaus Course Repository (SRC), is a wiki-based system that supplements the class descriptions by providing informative class resources like course syllabi, information about instructors, student population, and course retention rates. These resources provide students with valuable information when making choices and give students ownership by allowing them to make better choices. In the case of transfer students and freshmen, they have very little information to rely on when making decisions during their first registration for classes. With more knowledge of a specific course including an instructor’s pedagogy style, students will be able to make informed decisions. This information is not only valuable to students. New instructors may have trouble adapting to their new workplace. SRC gives new instructors a guide of how past instructors have taught and organized their classes. This information makes it easier for an instructor to pick up where a past instructor left off, or at least provide them with a framework to change and build off of. SRC also provides knowledge of how an instructor’s new department works. The goal of this system is to provide students with a supplement to the education they are receiving and to provide instructors with ideas and tools to make their jobs more efficient.

Learning management systems (LMSs) are in widespread use by universities and instructors. Many LMSs are designed to collect massive amounts of data from their users, but only allow instructors limited and uncustomized access to it. Without greater access to their students’ educational data, instructors cannot fully understand student learning behaviors and activities in their classroom. In addition, traditional LMSs lack the functionality for a structured educational content generation. Instructors must use third party software to create slides, pdf, and videos instead of generating them within the LMS itself. Open-source textbooks are referred to outside the LMS, instead of integrated into it. And sharing, revising and storing structured educational content, such as lesson modules, is either not possible, or difficult to do.

To address these problems in traditional LMSs, our group has designed and implemented a Cyberlearning Infrastructure that allows for free, open-source content generation with a learning analytics dashboard. Instructors are easily able to take advantage of free internet content, while also tracking the efficacy of the content through the analytics dashboard. Through our system, instructors will be able to create structured educational content from a variety of sources, including open textbooks, slides, test archives, videos, and more. This generated structured educational content is then compiled into an easily shareable, readable and editable JSON file. Conjointly, the system allows Instructors to view their students’ online learning behavior through easy-to-use analytics with visualization. This analytics will allow instructors to easily view student engagement, predict retention rates, and classify “at-risk” students.