In preparation for our ELI presentation, here are a few thoughts and resources to share with anyone interested in this topic. We will demo a section of an online module designed to present foundational concepts in Pharmakokinetics to first year PharmD students.
Caveats:
- Students log in to the module outside normal class time with their unique ID
- The module supports and enhances in-class interactions between students and with the instructor
- Only students’ behavior inside the instructional module is tracked
Why use clickstream data? What are the drivers?
- Accountability (accreditation; institutional accountability efforts)
- Affordances of the technology (easy to implement, unobtrusive)
- Research (scholarship of teaching and learning)
What factors raise concerns?
- Privacy issues. Do students know that their behavior online is tracked (similar to Blackboard page tracking)?
- The overall weight given to clickstream data as an assessment form
- How the resulting data will be used (high-stakes decision-making regarding individual students v. assessing overall class progress at a point in time)
What opportunities are presented?
- Improving individual and group learning outcomes by immediately identifying misconceptions and problems, and addressing them in class
- Modifying in-class instruction and activities to meet individual and class needs at the point in time in which they arise
- Discovering how students actually use interactive content (research)
- Improving the instructional impact of interactive content & online learning environments based on students’ behavior, feedback, and other assessments
- Mapping content, activities, and assessments into a connected whole rather than disparate parts
- Co-opting a method typically used by advertising/marketing to predict who will buy something and instead using it to better understand learners’ behavior and potentially, predict how people with different learning styles will use online environments (research)
- Providing students’ own clickstream data to help them reflect on their learning, progress, and strategies
Questions:
- Can a student turn off tracking or is it “always on”? Can a student choose to have his or her tracking be anonymous?
- How long is data stored? Where? What trends can reasonably be deduced over time?
- What is the best that tracking can tell us about learning? Where are the boundaries and what are the limits?
Next steps:
- Reports (sense-making from raw data to inform instructors, students, and designers)
- Visualization (graphs, charts, the elusive “dashboard” of learning outcomes)
Resources:
- Wikipedia: Clickstream
