Data and analytics
As learners and instructors interact with digital services they leave footprints that can be examined to make new and exciting discoveries about the way we teach and learn. Just as researchers study human behavior in physical classrooms, they can study human behavior in online learning environments.
The Unizin consortium empowers researchers to make discoveries never before possible by combining digital footprints created in multiple services, such as Canvas, Engage, and Top Hat, in the Unizin Data Platform (UDP). By examining learner and instructor behavior across multiple environments, researchers can ask complex questions that impact teaching and learning, for example:
- Do students who annotate their eText in Engage more often tend to earn higher grades in Canvas?
- Do students who have more consistent participation in Top Hat questions perform better on exams in Canvas?
- When instructors annotate their eText, do students tend to earn higher grades in Canvas? (The answer is yes!)
The Unizin Data Platform will also combine the digital footprints generated by learners and instructors across the entire consortium, enabling research across institutions of varying sizes, economies, and cultures. While these footprints will be removed from the context in which they were generated in order to protect their creators’ privacy, they will nonetheless be invaluable as indicators of learning behavior to be studied.
