Travels with Darcy and TLT

Dateline: November 19, 2014--Portland, Oregon

Darcy and I are here for the WCET annual conference and enjoying the emergence of a theme across many of the sessions. Big Data! The last time I was at WCET, two years ago, the talk was of the new, context-aware, feature-rich, learner-centered LMS. Today, nary a session on the topic in sight. This time, everyone is looking to the data. It's fun to see analytics of so many flavors: predictive, descriptive, action, vendor-culled, pattern-aware, and our own home-flavor: nudge. 

I think it was John Campbell, father of the Signals project at Purdue and the birth of dynamic learner access to pattern data, who said "If we're not applying it in action, why do the analytics?" Who would have thought his call to action would have seen such a rush to response. It took awhile, but some of the reported activity is quite jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring in its ambition and scope. 

I'll leave you to look at the work of new vendors like Civitas and Blue Canary. And to explore the potential of WCET's own baby, the now non-profit PAR Framework. You'll have to find conferences like this one to hear about the home-grown, data-driven learner environments and dashboards being implemented at places like Capella University and Rio Salado Community College. 

A lot of work done by all to get to the point where they're able to shape and join

the data, but just beginning to touch on the actions John Campbell intended, and made available to learners. Darcy and I are doing a session on starting at the beginning, with the low-hanging fruit of using data, small and accessible data sources, to inform, support and nudge students to success. 

Nudging Students to the Finish Line talks about a few action-nudge projects undertaken at UW Tacoma to keep students informed of their progress, options,

supports, smart practices and local resources. (Read more about UW Tacoma's approach to just-in-time nudge initiatives) at Not as sophisticated as the big data machines now churning at bigger money and enrollment schools than UW Tacoma, but aimed at achieving the same goals: better grades, better persistence, better engagement in the learning. 

In the session, we'll talk about UW Tacoma's practices of sending prompts to students, via phone, text message, and our new Canvas LMS. We share faculty LMS feature use ("message students who..."), peer and advisor phone calls based on an event status (students not registered for next quarter; students identified via early warning, etc), or machine-based support messages through a collaborating vendor, Persistence Plus, based on their cohort (first year experience; online math students, etc). 

Analytics in a diversity of flavors seems to be the hot topic of the year at a conference where smart, dedicated people are looking for ways to see the new learner to graduation. Wish you were here.