Subhadra
How do you track your online learning? Do you use spreadsheets to jot down your learning and courses? Or, use the old-school pen-and-paper method? Whatever the style, we have a better solution for you to track your learnings. Learning analytics is the perfect way to track your learning. Let us understand this not-so-famous concept, its uses, and its applications.
Defining Learning Analytics
Learning analytics combines your learning and data analytics to offer comprehensive and strategic suggestions based on the data you provide. You can imagine it to be an amalgamation of big data and traditional education. Your institutes, government, and educational organizations are collecting data about students and their learning patterns. But, all these data are unorganized and present in different locations.
Data science techniques are helping students to track their online learning and development, giving them a broader picture of their progress and suggestions on where to improve. Apart from students, even instructors can use computational analysis to create courses and training tailored to students’ requirements.
Applications of Learning Analytics
Using analytics to track your learning may seem recent, but it is reasonably old. Instead of the arduous process of analyzing data on spreadsheets, skilled analysts can access data using relevant tools, assimilate them, and offer insights. These insights will help instructors to understand the students and create courses accordingly. Some of the important applications of learning analytics include:
- Understand student development: Students’ development is not limited to academics. Instructors must be aware of how active students are beyond the classroom. They must know whether students take part in co-curricular activities, join different clubs to improve or limit themselves only to classroom sessions. And that’s where analytics come into the picture. Data of these aspects when analyzed, give insights on how to improve student development.
- Improve teaching practices: Using data on how students are learning – on their own, with extra assistance from instructors, etc. – teachers can create a relevant and useful curriculum. The aim is to focus on the overall development and not limit it to academics alone.
- Measure student performance: Analytics can offer great in-depth insights into student performance. It helps instructors track and understand the learning curve of all students. Thus, they can rework the curriculum or courses according to student performance.
Benefits
There are several benefits of learning analytics as it allows to track students’ growth meticulously. If you are contemplating to implement this in your institution, we will tell you why you MUST do it. Here are some of the top benefits of learning analytics that promote data-savvy learning strategies.
- Develop effective training programs: The primary purpose of learning analytics is to offer good insights into students and their performance. Using data collection tools, institutes and instructors can understand the existing practices and trends. Further, they come up with different ways to improve the existing course structure with a better one.
- Increases student engagement: One of the most important things that instructors must focus on in online training is engagement. Students must interact and engage with the instructors and the course material to perform well. When teachers have a better understanding of learning practices, they end up creating suitable courses. Consequently, students get a more personalized training experience and perform better.
- Lowers skill gaps: The diagnostic ability of analytics, enables program managers to detect any existing skill gaps amongst their employees. By removing these gaps, companies can develop consistent practices.
- Suggests effective ways for resource distribution: Since organizations have limited resources and time, it is vital to find efficient training strategies. By having data insights, companies can come up with efficient ways of resource utilization.
Conclusion
It’s time to upgrade your student performance tracking with technology. Implement learning analytics to have a sound understanding of your students and help them grow with tailor-made courses. After all, data analytics offers you insights you may often overlook. And these insights can help you transform your students into their best versions.
