Learning Analytics

Blog Posts

Happy New Year! Start Spring 2025 with Tools to Transform Your Teaching

 

As we welcome 2025, it’s the perfect time to refresh, reflect, and refocus on enhancing the learning experience for your students. NYU’s Learning Analytics team is here to support you in this new semester with powerful tools and resources designed to help you create impactful and engaging courses for Spring 2025.

Student Feedback Surveys

Start the semester strong with tools that allow you to gather meaningful feedback from your students. Integrated seamlessly into Brightspace, these surveys provide both quantitative and qualitative insights that can inform your teaching practices. Whether you’re looking for feedback on specific lessons or a broader view of course performance, these tools empower you to make data-driven adjustments that improve alignment and engagement.

Course Refresh Workshop

Looking to take a deeper dive into course design? The **Course Refresh Workshop** is a self-guided resource perfect for instructors ready to reflect on their courses in Brightspace. Designed for both new and experienced users, this workshop helps you:
– Align course objectives with assessments and materials using the Backwards Design framework.
– Refine assessment strategies by analyzing student performance data.
– Enhance student engagement by evaluating how instructional materials connect to assessments.

Whether you’re planning small tweaks or significant changes, this workshop offers practical strategies to refresh and optimize your courses for maximum impact.

Ready for Spring 2025

These resources will be available for your Spring 2025 courses. By combining insights from student feedback surveys with the comprehensive guidance of the Course Refresh Workshop, you can create a dynamic and student-centered learning environment that evolves with the needs of your class.

Let’s Make This Year a Success

With the new year comes new opportunities to grow and thrive as educators. The Learning Analytics team is here to help you make 2025 your best teaching year yet. Explore these resources and start transforming your courses today.

Here’s to a successful semester and a fulfilling new year!

We’re moving to AWS Quicksight!

What’s Happening?


D2L will be moving from Domo to AWS Quicksight for the visualization platform for learning analytics. 

Why are you switching platforms?

D2L had worked with a third party provider Domo to handle all visualizations seen in the Insights Portal and has decided to work with a different provider. Because this directly affects our service our team has been closely involved with the progress of the transition.

What’s Changing?

Underlying datasets will be the same, the same information will be provided. But the visualizations will change and that might affect how you access the data. It will open up a lot more ways they can share the data and as we create and test these dashboards we will update the progress here.

When will this happen?

The transition will be taking place over the Summer and be ready for the start of the Fall 2024 semester. We will continue to update the progress here.

 

Survey Workshop for Division of Programs in Business at SPS

Recently, I had the privilege of participating in an insightful education workshop titled “Soliciting Meaningful Student Feedback through Course Surveys.” I ran a workshop alongside Dr. Negar Farakish and Hue Soo Chae, for the faculty in the Division of Programs and Business at SSP. The workshop focused on designing surveys that elicit valuable insights from students.

The workshop began by emphasizing the importance of soliciting feedback directly from students to understand their learning experiences. We explained and  highlighted how well-designed course surveys can uncover students’ perspectives on instructional methods, course content relevance, assessment strategies, and overall classroom environment. This feedback supports faculty in making data-informed decisions to enhance their teaching practices.

For the group activity we had the faculty go into breakout rooms and discuss ways that they are using surveys in the classroom, or ways that they could begin using surveys. Discussions revolved around selecting appropriate response scales, knowing when a survey was appropriate, and taking action on what was learned through the surveys that are given.

The “Soliciting Meaningful Student Feedback through Course Surveys” workshop emphasized knowledge, skills, and strategies to harness the power of surveys in improving teaching and learning experiences. Using these insights, faculty can cultivate a culture of continuous improvement by actively soliciting and acting upon student feedback to create more engaging and impactful learning environments.

 

Show off your work as a Practitioner

SOLAR’s new Learning Analytics in Practice (LAP) event focuses on lightning talks and short form presentations

 

What is SoLAR?

The Learning Analytics Service in RIT pays for NYU’s institutional membership to the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). This organization manages a peer-reviewed journal for learning analytics researchers and practitioners that includes long-form, short-form and practitioner focused research papers. They are running a new online practitioner focused event called LAP on June 18th-20th 2024). NYU is a sponsor and membership to SOLAR is free!

 

Is this an opportunity for me?

 

The LAP event is fully online, running for a 24 hour period with participants in every timezone across the world. The focus is on hearing about what practitioners in the learning analytics space are doing. The format is mostly short-form, as is the proposal. Are you working on a new GenAI tool that provides student feedback? Are you analyzing the impact of an ed tech tool on student engagement or outcomes? Deploying a new tool with faculty or students? Share your work with other practitioners across the world.

 

Types of Presentations

  • 60-minute Panel

    • This should provide 3-5 panelists plus a moderator on a specific topic relevant to Learning Analytics in Practice
    • For example, you may see a panel from a featured SoLAR institutional member with panelists who are stakeholders at different levels or areas of their institution and how they implemented certain strategies to implement Learning Analytics. 

  • LAP Showcase / Demo (20 minutes)

  • Lightning Talk (10 minutes)

    • These would be very short talks about an idea or innovative project. The aim could be to look for collaborators in a certain area of expertise or to brainstorm with the group. Presenters are encouraged to have a “call to action” to further discussions after their short discussion. 
    • Lightning talks are not required to fill out the ‘Full Presentation Description’

  • LAP Challenges

    • List practical questions and problems and ask for solutions and ideas
    • 5 minutes for elaborating the problem and 10 minutes for discussion

  • Other:

    • Tell us your ideas, this form is meant to be agile. 

 

Questions or Collaborations

If you’re looking for presentation partners, or you’re interested in group presentation types like a Panel or LAP Challenges presentation, please reach out to learning.analytics@nyu.edu. We’d love to help.

SOLAR – Society for Learning Analytics Research

Get involved with the field of Learning Analytics: SOLAR membership discounts & opportunities

 

What is SoLAR?

The Learning Analytics Service in RIT pays for NYU’s institutional membership to the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). This organization manages a peer-reviewed journal for learning analytics researchers and practitioners that includes long-form, short-form and practitioner focused research papers. They also run a yearly international conference called LAK, and an online practitioner focused conference called LAP (the first instance of this being in June 2024). Additionally, SoLAR shares newsletters and opportunities to join in new analytics projects with its members that represent learning and professional development opportunities to students and professionals.

How can the LA service help me?

For LAK 24, important registration deadline dates include:

Early-bird Registration Jan. 29th, 2023 Student cost: $315, Regular cost: $625
Registration Mar. 22nd, 2023 Student cost: $390, Regular cost: $740

Through our institutional membership, students save $100 between membership and registration, and faculty/staff save around $240. There are also other perks that include attendance at institutional member functions, as well as free registration for online events such as the Learning Analytics Practitioner conference.

How do I become a member through our membership?

Students, Faculty, and Staff can become a member of SoLAR through their online registration form. You will need to contact learning.analytics@nyu.edu to get our unique NYU institutional membership code to add in the discount code box. Membership runs yearly, so those interested in joining do this each year around December or January. To fill out the form, you’ll need the discount code, as well as basic email information for your NYU email account.

Click Here for steps on how to fill out the registration form