This week is the first week of a new distance learning course at my university, the first time I’ve tutored it, and the first university course for most of the twenty or so students in my tutor group.  So I’d like to check that they have started, have got their software to work, know their way round the web site, how they’re managing to find sixteen hours a week to study and generally how they are doing.    All I know though is that ten of them are brand new to the university and that half a dozen or so of the others have studied only ten points of an on-line course without tutor or tutorials.  I’ve emailed them all and heard back from four of them.  So how do I find out?

This week’s LAK12 readings  include a paper on a platform to integrate learning analytics techniques (pdf) with examples of analysis available to the student, the tutor and the administrator.  Such analysis for the tutor would indicate those students potentially at risk as well as access and progress patterns.  How I wish I had such rapid analysis because I can only find out limited information, for example, by looking at each individual student’s past history on each posting that is in the tutor group forum.   Yet I know this is a risky time for them because they may not yet have realised how much work there is and where to concentrate their efforts.

Would that my university provided the learning analytics platform that SOLAR proposes!  Now I’m off to phone half a dozen students.