I was very interested to read a story in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about “Signals,” a piece of software developed at Purdue that gives students feedback about how they’re doing in a course: chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-u-software-prompt-students-to-study-and-graduate/46853 The data on the software’s effect on student retention was truly astonishing. Signals seems to be tightly integrated with Blackboard, but it sounds reminiscent of the promise of MOOCs to improve “learning analytics”: online.stanford.edu/news/2013/04/11/learning-analytics-stanford-takes-huge-leap-forward-moocs, even though the analytics it presents are available to students. We talked about the Signals story a bit on our podcast, Digital Campus, but I’d love to look into it even more, and to get different perspectives. It did make me wonder whether MOOCs even have the right approach to learning analytics, since mostly what I’ve heard about them suggests that such analytics are only provided to faculty and administrators rather than to the students themselves. It also made me wonder whether software like Purdue’s could be adopted and customized by universities themselves using in-house developers.
I saw this same story and speculated on twitter that students might like this kind of feedback based on the other data feeds they are used to receiving. For example, fitness apps like myfitnesspal or fitbit make tracking data about your life and taking action based on that data part of the normal routine. Has this been a side effect of all the standardized testing? St. Edward’s has been exploring retention software, but I like the idea of empowering the students, as well. I will say, however, that we would be more likely to buy a complete package than develop in house. While we might have the expertise to do this, we don’t have the resources to constantly maintain such platforms, especially after the developers leave. We are much more likely to use something with commercial support or a vibrant user community.