Invited Talks

Presentation for the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, November 2.

A vast majority of postsecondary institutions support and augment classroom instruction using a Learning Management System (LMS)—current figures estimate that over 95% of colleges and universities in the United States deploy an LMS on their campus. Given the penetration of LMSs throughout higher education and the depth of use on most campuses, these systems offer a ready source of data that can be analyzed to facilitate academic decisions for a growing number of students. I will describe a project in which we use an application of academic analytics to enhance an existing academic mentoring program, called "the M-STEM Academy," aimed at improving student success and retention in STEM fields. The focus of the intervention described in this talk is to leverage data collected by a LMS to develop a series of data visualizations and "early warning" prediction models that can be used by students, instructors, and academic administrators to provide near real-time information on students' academic progress. This project builds upon prior LMS research and the success of the M-STEM Academy to further improve engineering education by providing rich and actionable views of student performance in conjunction with effective support strategies. The overall findings will guide future interventions that combine large data sources, technological warning systems, and purposeful academic support throughout the STEM disciplines and beyond.

Presentation for the Cool Toys group, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 29.

An overview of learning analytics as well as recent examples from higher education and current projects underway at the University of Michigan.

From The Horizon Report, 2011:
"Learning analytics promises to harness the power of advances in data mining, interpretation, and modeling to improve understandings of teaching and learning, and to tailor education to individual students more effectively. Still in its early stages, learning analytics responds to calls for accountability on campuses across the country, and leverages the vast amount of data produced by students in day-to-day academic activities. While learning analytics has already been used in admissions and fund-raising efforts on several campuses, “academic analytics” is just beginning to take shape."

Presentation for the School of Information & Library Studies (SILS), University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland, May 25.

Technology-enabled learning is increasingly important and pervasive in higher education. Web-based systems such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) allow instructors and students to share instructional materials, make class announcements, submit and return course assignments, and communicate with each other online. While the adoption rate for these systems has been rapid, little is known about how university faculty and students use these systems for blended learning and if they are helping instructors to change their classroom practices. In research conducted in the USE Lab at the University of Michigan, we have been exploring the perceived benefits and actual use of a LMS by instructors and students when the system supplements traditional face-to-face classroom instruction. In this talk, I present data from online surveys, system log data, and case studies to examine the current practice of university teaching with a LMS. Our findings suggest that despite the growing number of tools available in the LMS, at present they are not generally changing teaching practice other than simply providing more time for instructors to be the "sage on the stage". In designing educational technology, we need to think about how existing and new tools can transform the role of the instructor in the classroom and move away from practices that are based on the assumption that learning is limited to in-class time. However, for any tool to play a significant role in shaping education, LMS implementers need to help instructors and students learn to use them in innovative and meaningful ways.

Poster Presentation at the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) 2010 Project Meeting, Washington, D.C., May.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software applications used to support classroom teaching and administration, to facilitate access to learning content, and to enhance collaborative learning. LMS are ubiquitous in higher education, although little is known about how faculty and students use them to support learning. Our on-going exploration of how LMS support university students’ collaborative learning involves conceptual understanding across the fields of education, learning and cognition, and information technology. Our research focuses on how a large university’s online learning management system, the Sakai community-source architecture, is used by instructors and students. We organize our investigation by examining learner-learner, learner-instructor, and learner-content interactions. Data includes survey perceptions and value of LMS, system event logs across LMS tools, and qualitative feedback regarding how LMS has impacted instructors’ use of in-class time. The presentation will emphasize the qualitative results, comparing the perceptions of instructors (n = 657) and students (n = 1,783), as well as comparing across a commuter and residential campus. Both campuses suggest that current use of LMS facilitates in-class learner-content interaction, whereas learner-learner and learner-instructor interaction was cited much less frequently. Instructors and students gave similar reports about the nature of this change, although their perceptions differed regarding the degree to which LMS use facilitated logistics, provided access to materials, and changed the pace of instruction. Implications intended to improve teaching and learning will be discussed.

Panel Presentation for the University Library Series on Assessment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, April 20.

For this panel, we will hear staff from around the university share their experiences developing and administering assessment tools. Panelists will describe how they create questions, the type of information about students they are collecting, and how their assessment projects are similar and unique. Panelists will include Suzanne Chapman, Library Information Technology and the Usability Working Group; Steven Lonn, USE Lab and CTools Annual Survey; and Gaurav Bhatnagar, Interaction Designer and Sakai-Library Community. Jen Green will moderate the panel.

Presentation for the Future Learning Spaces Workshop organized by the STELLAR Network of Excellence for the Alpine Rendez-Vous 2009, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, December 1.

Technology-enabled learning is increasingly important and pervasive in higher education. Web-based systems such as Course Management Systems (CMS) or Learning Management Systems (LMS) allow instructors and students to share instructional materials, make class announcements, submit and return course assignments, and communicate with each other online. While the adoption rate for these systems has been rapid, very little is known about how these systems are being used and if they are helping instructors change their classroom practices. Early adopters of LMS have typically come to these applications because they promise to make teaching more efficient (Morgan, 2003) and most LMS are used for the distribution, management, and retrieval of course materials (Lonn & Teasley, 2009). However, these systems can also incorporate functionality that supports interaction between students and instructors and among students (West, Waddoups, & Graham, 2007), and provide opportunities for enabling institutional innovations in learning and education (Dutton, Cheong, & Park, 2003). In the use of LMS today, are there innovations in instructors' classroom practices fostered by LMS and what can LMS offer to the vision of "future learning spaces"?

Presentation for the red-ink Doctoral School organized by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Schwarzee, Switzerland, March.

Presentation for the Psychology Department at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich, Germany, March.

Presentation at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Bonn, Germany, March.