Keeping everyone OnTask

Gauging the impact of personalised feedback through academic case studies

Abstract

Student-directed feedback is an important factor in student achievement. However, contemporary higher education presents challenges for instructors to be able to provide timely and personalised feedback, especially in the context of large courses. Learning analytics can be employed as a viable solution to the challenges of feedback provision, as it draws on learner engagement data and individual progress to enable personalised learning feedback to students. Many student-facing LA reporting systems have been developed, but these have been criticised as being too generic to be useful for stakeholders. Recently, research has begun to explore more contextualised LA-based approaches to feedback, which allow instructors to select relevant metrics of engagement to provide personalised feedback to students. This paper describes three case studies currently being carried out at one Australian higher education institution, which employs one such system, referred to as OnTask. The considerations of using such systems are discussed.