Using skills and approaches I learned in the MET … I will eventually create a proposal for implementing a learning analytics approach at VCC.
Goal #2
Goal 2 Main Page | Artifact #5 | Artifact #6 | Artifact #7 | Artifact #8
Format: Academic Paper
Course: ETEC 542 Culture and in Communication Virtual Learning Environments
As a way to begin understanding the cultural diversity of staff and students, I pulled together some data on diversity at VCC. This gave me an early opportunity (before I completed the learning analytics course) to experiment with data collection with a specific end in mind. I chose the doc format because this is easiest to maintain, edit and share with colleagues.
Guiding Theories and Frameworks
Notions of ‘troublesome knowledge‘ and its usefulness in the learning process are relevant here. Meyer and Land (2005) suggest (in Montgomery, 2011) that in order for students to move on from ‘stuckness’ and disjunction beyond ‘liminal’ stages, higher education programs…need to have ‘fluid’ spaces where students are allowed to visit and revisit new knowledge. This is especially true in multicultural contexts. It is a useful reminder of the need to design these fluid spaces into online curricula, rather than simply providing the same content to all and expecting everyone to learn in the same way.
Reflections
Learning analytics is about the collection of data to provide actionable insights. In other words, we collect data that we can use to improve outcomes.
Understanding the diversity of the student and staff population at VCC is a useful first step for a whole host of possible actions, including the way faculty design online curricula, and the way we, the teaching and learning centre, design educational experiences to better equip faculty for online teaching readiness.
The course also gave me an insight into the ways in which diversity can impact course design and student engagement and interaction (Artifact 2 contains more reflection of this). Given the make-up of the student population at my college, this is likely to be essential knowledge.