You might remember that back in Week 6 I told you about a learning analytics project that’s going on at QUT and elsewhere, and that you’d have the opportunity to participate. Well, we are ready to roll!

I’m sold. Sign me up!

This post is a bit rambly, so if you just want to cut to the chase and get involved, go sign up right now! Make sure you put in your Twitter ID and your IFN614 site username. Your site username is the name you use to log in to the site. If you’re not sure what that is, go to your profile and have a look at the username that appears in the URL. For example:

• my profile is at http://2015.informationprograms.info/user/kate/ and the ‘kate’ is my username
• Clare’s profile is at http://2015.informationprograms.info/user/clare/ and the ‘clare’ is her username

You don’t need to worry about Facebook, seeing we’re not using it in this unit.

And here’s why you should participate

I’m so excited about this. It’s an awesome opportunity for you guys to get access to a dashboard that allows you to explore your social media data and your activity around the unit site. It’s also a really great project for those academics (like me) who teach ‘in the wild’ – outside Blackboard, using custom built sites and a range of social media tools. The project will ultimately help us to do a better job of teaching, because we can get real time data about what’s going on in the community, which will allow us to tweak things and make your experience better.

The very best part is that we’re the first unit on board with the project, and that means it’s open slather on development requests. The learning analytics team have put together a dashboard for you and one for me, but they can add other stuff as we go. So if you think of any ideas for what you’d like to see in your dashboard, let me know and I’ll pass requests on.

As an example of a possible future development, one of the things I’ve been talking to the analytics team about is some kind of widget to help you get a sense of the extent of contribution you’re making to the learning community. As you know, we assess participation, and students often ask me if they’re making a big enough contribution to get a good mark. We don’t yet have the capability to ascertain the quality of your contributions through analytics, but we could potentially give you an idea of where you rank in terms of volume of contributions.

Anyway, I’m clearly a data nerd and very excited about the possibilities here.

You guys will also have the option of participating in focus groups and/or surveys down the track to talk about your experience of using the dashboard.

Participation is, of course, voluntary, and you won’t be disadvantaged in any way if you don’t participate. This is just a bit of an added extra. Good for you; good for me; good for the project; and good for the students of the future. Pay it forward! Think of the children! Ok, it’s been a big week and I may be a bit overtired and overexcited. But this is nonetheless a good thing to do, and will benefit other people in the future.

Go sign up now!

And just to reiterate…

Make sure you put in your Twitter ID and your IFN614 site username. Instructions for getting your IFN614 site username are at the top of this post.