Investment in learning analytics solutions continues to increase, with the goal to improve student success & retention - but how do institutions get the most value out of their investment in learning analytics?
Learning analytics can be a very powerful solution to help institutions improve student success and retention.
As shown in the graph above, the success of analytics is extremely dependent on the data coming from the LMS and other tools in the learning ecosystem. Higher online student activity leads to more data for the analytics tools to analyze.
The only way to increase online student activity is having faculty increase the use of educational technology in their courses. This means not only posting a syllabus, but actively engaging students to improve their online teaching and learning.
Research shows that most courses are still being used as a content repository:
If faculty members do not adopt new tools and utilize them to their full potential, institutions will not get maximum value out of their investment in learning analytics.
Faculty adoption is a top issue
Related to the relatively low adoption of technology is the fact that faculty development & engagement is one of the biggest issues in teaching and learning (see our blog post), and it has been one of the top three issues for the last five years (see the Educause ELI 2019 survey).
Thus, to improve insights gained from learning analytics solutions, institutions must focus on enabling faculty to make full use of the features, tools, and services available.
As faculty adoption improves, a higher level of online student activity emerges.
As a direct consequence, higher levels of student activity online means more high-quality activity data that can be used to derive insight about student success & retention via analytics solutions.
How to improve faculty adoption?
Current solutions include in-person training sessions and workshops for faculty members, online courses, and emails - lots of emails. While effective for the first few days, these training methods often fail to help educators sustain and grow their knowledge over time, creating a knowledge gap (see chart below).
At EesySoft, we provide a comprehensive toolset of LMS adoption & support solutions that address the faculty knowledge gap through just-in-time learning.
Institutions all over the world use EesySoft to place proactive messages directly within their LMS environment that inspire, inform, or engage faculty members regarding tools, features, and updates available to them. See the example below or learn more about our adoption package here.
Supporting faculty adoption
In addition to proactive messages to improve engagement with specific tools and features, EesySoft also provides a suite of LMS support solutions. EesySupport enables users to easily access help articles within the LMS in context with their recent activity and provides a direct link to your help desk.
If you have any questions about EesySoft or want to try it for free, please get in contact with our team at hello@eesysoft.com.