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LMS Add-Ons: A Closer Look at Brightspace Student Success Tool

For this assignment I was asked to investigate a Learning Analytics tool. I chose to explore a learning management system (LMS) add-on tool for Brightspace. I found that the tool made some lofty promises but there wasn’t quite the evidence behind it to warrant the additional cost and work to implement.

There are a number of these types of additional LMS features and tools available for purchase. I learned from this assignment that educational technology marketing can be very convincing but it’s important to think critically about the claims. In an emerging field like learning analytics rapidly advancing technology mean new products come to market quickly. It’s hard to balance skepticism with adopting and piloting new technology.

The full assignment PDF can downloaded below

Assignment 1 – Evaluation of Brightspace Student Success Tool
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Text Analysis: Using Quantext to Explore Teacher Quality Surveys in Higher Education

In this self-guided research project I explored how learning analytics could be applied teacher quality surveys in higher education. This was my final assignment for the Learning Analytics course in my MET.

Evaluation surveys are controversial among educators in post-secondary. Important decisions including tenure and promotions can be based on student evaluation surveys despite concerns around their validity.

I wanted to explore how text-analysis could be applied to these surveys. I used a text-analysis tool called Quantext to explore how long answer questions in a survey or even potentially student portfolios could be analysed for the purpose of instructor evaluation. I was pleased with my early experimentation and look forward to applying text analysis to my future assessment work.

Below is an informal video walk through of my project that I created for my classmates.

You can read the full version of my report below:

Text Analysis with Quantext Report