The future of education relies on technology to deliver, assess, and support learning and facilitate improvement. Yet, across higher education today, there are multiple bottlenecks in technology infrastructures. These include disparate solutions not “talking to each other,” an inability to unlock data for meaningful reporting, and data “collecting dust” instead of being activated for improvement because they are simply inaccessible or lost in tangled code. Creating and maintaining a culture for improvement means you have a process to collect and activate assessment data that matters.
In an age where the value of higher education continues to be questioned, and alternative learning pathways and digital credentialing are ubiquitous, creating and maintaining a data-centric culture is no longer a “nice to have.” Academic quality in action includes having a routine process to collect data, activate it to enhance course design, make data-informed decisions to improve student learning outcomes and drive your strategic direction. In action, it means that all stakeholders, from administrators to faculty to students, can look directly into the mirrors of their data, identify the changes that need to be made—and then make them.
The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) defines this kind of integrated planning as a framework “that builds relationships, aligns the organization, and emphasizes preparedness for change.” This includes collecting data to serve as both the impetus for change and a common language to foster it.
- Institutional stakeholders, including administrators, faculty, and staff want to answer questions using their data:
- Which learning applications have the greatest impact on student performance, and in which context?
- How are learners using tools to support their learning, and are they making an impact?
- Which applications are most utilized by learners? Which applications are underutilized?
- How can I combine different data streams to inform improvements and scale applications?
But what happens when:
- Data exists but is virtually unusable. Instead, they remain locked away in each of your edtech applications or even in internal data silos creating barriers and duplicative data.
- You manage to collect that data in your data warehouse, but it comes in various formats, making it difficult to take action and track impact longitudinally.
Ensuring a more cohesive and effective edtech environment for teaching and learning is only realized when your learning platforms and tools seamlessly work together and foster an environment of visible student learning analytics, which include learning metadata.
Many times institutions don’t know the questions to ask their edtech suppliers or even how to recognize which suppliers support interoperability standards and use them in their products and applications and which don’t until it is too late. Tools built on 1EdTech’s LTI® Advantage Data enable you to receive Caliper Analytics® formatted data to accelerate data access from multiple edtech solutions in one standard format for consumption and use in improving student learning outcomes.
LTI Advantage Data combines the industry standard Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI) with the basic requirements of Caliper Analytics to unlock data about edtech tool use and engagement.
Simply put, LTI Advantage Data helps tools talk to one another and provide data in a consistent, accessible, and trusted format, removing custom integrations and accelerating action planning.
By requesting access to your data from your edtech suppliers, ideally via Caliper, you can:
- Identify application usage and student engagement with applications sent to your institution’s dashboards/data warehouse in a consistent, consumable format.
- Determine how the applications are being used, what is effective, and what is having an impact on learning
- Design strategies to connect data back to individual users across applications and platforms to identify patterns and trends for informed decision-making and future growth.
- Foster the important work of creating data definitions and governance structures to understand and use data meaningfully.
Knowledge is power. Advocate for your data at no additional cost and ensure that your suppliers are using interoperability standards so you can ensure that your feedback loop is consistent and accessible to all stakeholders. Data quality is an ongoing project, but it doesn’t have to be cumbersome if your ecosystem is built on standards that provide reliable data downstream for consumption and use in practice.
About the Author
Suzanne Carbonaro
Suzanne Carbonaro is the director of higher education programs at 1EdTech. Suzanne spent much of her career in higher education as a leader of curriculum and assessment, instruction and student success, institutional effectiveness and planning, and accreditation. Over the last five years, Suzanne has been a subject matter expert for two edtech companies. She supported the growth of interoperability standards, strategic planning processes, and the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) across the colleges and universities she served. Suzanne’s research interests and publications include digital credentials and CLR, high-impact practices, co-curricular assessment, and integrated strategic planning. Suzanne currently serves on the Grand Challenges in Assessment, a national collaboration of ten organizations and over 400 higher education leaders seeking to advance the assessment of student learning through discourse, research, and professional learning.
