After reading the "Analytics
in Progress: Technology Use, Student Characteristics, and Student Achievement",
I found that the correlation between family income with student achievent
sounds very interesting since it may answer to vital questions such as Does low family income mean higher
need of more compact and efficient need of online learning? Does the economic
crisis diminish the time for studying of learners and hence do they need more
focused and personalised solutions? Does this situation make them more
competitive?
Since the last 5 years the economic situation has changed
dramatically, it would be very interesting to use historical data in order to
identify the overall relationship between income and student performance.
Considering the Assignment
desciption that is provided by the CN-1379-LAK2013, I
decided to follow the question-based structure that the description of the
assignment follows:
1. What do you want to do/understand
better/solve?
I
would like to identify the potential correlation between the last 5-year family
income with the student performance in terms of both formal assessment
(assignment grades, final grades etc) and involvement in learning activities.
In other words, I would like to understand if the economic crisis is mirrored
in the behavior of students in the courses offered by the sole open university
of Greece, the Hellenic Open University.
2. Defining the context:
what is it that you want to solve or do? Who are the people that are involved?
What are social implications? Cultural?
There are some questions that can justify my research question
and help to define the context:
a. Does low family income mean higher need of more compact
and efficient need of online learning?
b. Does the economic crisis diminish the time for studying of
learners and hence do they need more focused and personalised
solutions? Does this situation make them more competitive?
c. Condifering the difficulties that occur after an economic
crisis, are students more passionate to join
a course and to get involved? Or, on the other hand, do they feel that some of their
time for studying should be used for working?
d. Do the insecure feelings
about the future affect the performance in an online course? Positively or
negatively?
The communities involved
in this problem are:
1. Academic bodies such as Hellenic Open University (HOU) that offers online
courses through environments such as Moodle etc. Their courses run through
distance education procedures where the main body of the course is provided
through Moodle, Lotus Quickr, and HOU2LEARN (an Elgg-based experimental PLE).
Furthermore, 5 physical tutoring meetings take place each year for every
course. HOU offers the basic set of material (hardcopy and software) and
students are encouraged to procure additional content. An M.Sc in HOU consists
of 5 courses and each of them costs ~800euros.
2. Students are in their majority working people and they selected HOU for
their studies because it offers curricula that can combine studies and work.
Social implications in
this problem I propose, lay on the pressing economical situation of an average
working person in Greece, who has to work harder in order to face it and on the
other hand, has to be more qualified in order to increase the possibilities to
do it successfully.
3. Brainstorm ideas/challenges around your problem/opportunity. How
could you solve it? What are the most important variables?
Our research could start
correlating the most important variables which appear to be: a. historical digital
traces that every student leaves while uses the environments that HOU Offers,
b. institutional and administrative data that concern assignments grades, final
exams grades and level participation to the physical meeting for each student
and c. information about the family income for each student for every year that
he/she is student of HOU. Preferably, this research could give more useful
results if it focuses on the students that have started their studies at least
after 2008.
4. Explore potential data
sources. Will you have problems accessing the data? What is the shape of the
data (reasonably clean? or a mess of log files that span different systems and
will require time and effort to clean/integrate?) Will the data be sufficient
in scope to address the problem/opportunity that you are investigating?
The research could start
collecting all historical data of the University during last 5 years. This historical
data include all digital traces that Moodle, Lotus Quickr and HOU2LEARN have
collected in their databases, along with the institutional and administrative
data that concern assignments grades, final exams grades and level participation
to the physical meeting for each student.
Last but extremely important variable is the family income for every student
every year.
Some of the issues that arise, are:
1. The database schema of Moodle, Lotus Quickr and HOU2LEARN: Are
compatible each other? Technical issues such as if a student has the same id
for each of them may require time and effort. Integration of databases of these
three different systems are expected to require notable resources.
2. Is HOU aware of the family income of every student? Is the university
willing to provide this data? Ethics and privacy issues have to be respected adequately.
In case that HOU cannot give this data or doesn’t have it, what other
alternative solutions may apply? For example, could a questionnaire be sent to
the students about their past family outcomes and how their participation could
be ensured?
3. It is a large scale project that requires a very smart exploitation of
data. This means that after dealing with the mess of log files, and creating a
clean database schema that integrates all systems and variables (grades and
incomes), a sophisticated list of metrics that will measure the learning
activity across the years and systems, has to be designed.
5. Consider the aspects
of the problem/opportunity that are beyond the scope of analytics How will your
analytics model respond to these analytics blind spots?
I do believe that
this analytic model tracks the learning behavior of learners according their family
outcome and responds to the in-financial-crisis era needs. This analytic model will
help identifying how a distance learning course should be conformed according the
new conditions that have arisen due to the economic crisis contributing thus to
the design of an even more Personalized Learning Environment.
Finally, this analytics model could also be extended
beyond the greek borders, creating a cross-country network, that include
additional countries that face the economic crisis such as Spain, Italy and
Portugal.
