Analytics have been an important part of measuring student engagement at UMBC, especially during the pandemic.
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Author:
John Fritz
Associate Vice President for Instructional Technology
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County
We've built an infrastructure that now is primed and ready to kind of look at the data in different ways. You know, one of the things we early on did was...Bob Carpenter, who is my colleague who's our associate dean for analytics, he was looking at students who were only using their mobile devices and wondering, was this an indication of a digital access issue? And so we would do some nudges and reach out to students, and in some cases they simply said they preferred it simply because they're always connected to their phone and so they would do things that way, but just the fact that we were kind of worried about students who were only on their mobile devices, it was a way to kind of follow up on those kinds of things.
For years now we've also always been looking at sort of students' digital footprints as a proxy for their engagement in the course generally, and there have been some concerns about some students who even were active, but since the push to all-remote instruction have not been active, that has triggered some follow-up advocacy questions or sort of case management to kind of see how people are doing. But I think just generally...you know, I've heard Tom say it and I would say it, nobody planned to go online this way but the fact that we have has kind of put analytics potentially in the spotlight.