Improving Student Success Online

The recent announcement that Desire2Learn will partner with IBM and use 'predictive analytics' to improve educational outcomes in e-learning is interesting on a few fronts. Tony Bates would like to know, "who is designing the algorithims and the questions they are intended to answer, what assumptions are driving the design, who has access to the data, what rights students and instructors will have, and how institutions plan to use analytics from online teaching".

I am interested in the announcement for the following reasons. Currently Desire2Learn is the platform that we use for our online and blended learning course delivery as part of eLearning Ontario. They also provide the platform which houses the Ontario Educational Resource Bank. Therefore, we stand to benefit directly from this relationship and the tools that will be developed to improve student success. The Smarter Education Solution, will, "offer early-warning systems for at-risk students, instructional intervention plans, insights on teaching effectiveness and other features."

Currently, when we discuss work with students we identify 'success criteria' - what strategies need to be employed, what tasks need to be completed, what resources need to be utilized, in order to achieve high levels of success in a specific task. It is intended to be explicit so that students become better at understanding the process of learning and improving their ability to learn. At staff meetings we also discuss specific instructional interventions in order to help students move from lower levels of achievement to higher levels of success on a more consistent basis. We also attempt to measure the effectiveness of our interventions with the hope of identifying which ones are more likely to produce the desired results.

So, the Smarter Education Solution is replicating a process that is already in place, but applying it to the online environment. Hopefully, it will provide the means of improving meta-cognition among students and providing educators with more precise means of evaluating instructional methods. Here is a thought, will the new solution afford us the means of prescribing a more individualized learning experience for students based on their 'learning profile' which would enable them to be more successful?

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