The academic analytics tool: Workflow and use cases

Abstract

To meet the demand for timely analysis and revision of online courses, educators need ongoing, unfettered access to data about how students interact with courses and online resources. Currently available tools for exploring student data provide some important insights, but are typically focused on automated data mining, visualizations, or displaying pre-set reports. These tools also often require either high technical skills and/or installation of specialized software, making them inaccessible to most educators and learning designers. In this paper, we introduce the Academic Analytics Tool (AAT) and provide some hands-on examples on how the tool can be used. AAT is designed to allow people (e.g., educators, learning designers, etc.) without technical expertise to extract and analyse data from learning management systems (LMSs). AAT offers high usability and permits full exploration of LMSs’ data on any computer with internet access to foster responsive analysis and improvement of online courses.