Developing and Evaluating a Learning Analytics Platform to Support University Teachers for Pedagogical Decision-making in Fostering Reflective Engagement of Students

The project aims to develop a learning analytics platform conducive to data-oriented decision-making; to evaluate the impact of a learning analytics platform on facilitating reflective engagement of students in the learning process; and to evaluate the impact of a learning analytics platform on teachers’ pedagogical decision making. The expected outcomes include a deliverable learning analytics platform, which can help teachers gain a better understanding of students’ learning process, and identify learning issues to predict learning patterns and make corresponding pedagogical decision-making; a higher quality learning-teaching process, which will provide flexible teaching and learning environments where students can control their own learning; the platform will also segregate the learning objects into appropriate segments so as to address the needs of students with different learning styles; a higher degree of engagement in learning with reflection, which will enable students to engage in learning with reflective thinking associated with personal experience and social issues and interact with peers and teachers anytime, anywhere; and a transformation of teachers’ traditional pedagogical practices of summative assessment into formative assessment, which will enable teachers to give students assessment that corresponds to their learning performance (i.e. through statistical report on students’ responses on online quizzes) throughout the learning process. With various tasks and discussions throughout a course, apart from being able to give quality feedback to students, teachers will also have a clear understanding of what students know and do not know during the learning process instead of at the end of a unit of instruction. A deliverable learning analytics platform, pilot test reports, the establishment of a community of practice, analysis of evaluation data and guidelines on the use of the platform are the expected key deliverables of the project. The project dissemination activities include three teacher professional development programs for reporting the design and implementation of the learning analytics platform in the proposed project, two presentations for reporting the development and implementation status of the learning analytics platform and two conference presentations for disseminating the effects of a learning analytics platform on supporting university teachers for pedagogical decision-making in fostering reflective engagement of students.

Funding Source: UGC - Block Grant