====== Education Analytics ======

===== Education Analytics Involved Product =====

==== Blackboard Analytics ====
  - url http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Analytics/Overview.aspx
  - Introduction: Transform enterprise data into actionable information. Make more informed, timely decisions to help significantly improve performance. With the Blackboard Analytics™ platform, you’ll have easy, self-service access to data that matters. You’ll reap the benefits of data warehousing, reporting, and dashboards while avoiding technical pitfalls found in other solutions. With tools like this, we can build a better education experience by fostering a culture of data-informed decision making.
  - Functionalities
    - **Student Management Suite**. Improve Student Outcomes and Optimize Resources. Identify at-risk populations for early intervention. Align recruiting strategies and institutional aid awards with enrollment and retention objectives. Discover vital new insights into your student population. Manage course loads and class utilization. Help allocate resources more effectively. Blackboard Analytics™ offers two product modules that work together to support the challenges of the academic affairs and enrollment management offices: Student Management and Financial Aid. 
       - Student Management. With the Blackboard Analytics Student Management module you’ll have easy, self-service access to data that can help you make significant improvements—from developing more effective recruiting strategies and creating proactive retention plans to monitoring and influencing performance. Find out exactly what’s working and what needs to be improved in every aspect of the student information lifecycle: Effective Recruiting, Strategic Enrollment Management, Course Optimization, Performance Management, Student Retention, Early Intervention, Outcomes Management, Graduation
       - Financial Aid. With the addition of our Financial Aid module you’ll have access to an integrated data set of financial aid, admissions, and enrollment data for targeted analyses to: Determine which combinations of student need and academic credential achieve the best admission yield; Better allocate financial aid to achieve the optimal yields; Track the status of the financial aid workflow; Understand how retention varies based on financial aid award patterns; Align offer strategies with retention objective.
    - **Analytics for Learn**. Blackboard Analytics for Learn™ combines the extensive data from Blackboard Learn™ with student and course attributes from your SIS/ERP to create comprehensive reports and dashboards for your students, instructors, staff and leadership. 
       - Students. Get them engaged by giving them information to monitor their performance in courses and compared to peers. Student dashboards from Blackboard Analytics for Learn can be accessed by the students in their Blackboard Learn courses.
       - Instructors. Give them a better, faster way to get to data that can help them help their students. Course dashboards and other reports from Blackboard Analytics for Learn are available to instructors in their Blackboard Learn courses.
       - Staff and Leadership. With Blackboard Analytics for Learn, you have easy, self-service access to data that can help give you an enterprise-level perspective. Gain insight into user activity, course design and student grade and learning outcome data across departments and colleges, enabling you to improve your use of the Blackboard Learn platform in support of teaching, learning, and student success. 
       - Get Answers to Your Most Important Questions Like: 
          - What student activities are correlated to desired outcomes like grades and course completion?
          - How can I easily find students who are at-risk? 
          - Who are the most innovative instructors?
          - How are students performing on learning outcomes over time?
          - What strategies to improve the quality of course design and instruction result in better student performance? Instructor training courses? Course reviews?
          - Which tools are being used in courses the most? The least? Which are most effective to enhance student engagement & success?
          - How many logins, time on task, and other metrics have occurred over time?
==== Canvas Analytics ====
  - url http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152
  - Introduction: In June,2012 the LMS startup Instructure unveiled its analytics feature. With it, students can view their assignments, grades, and other performances stats, and they can see how they’re doing compared to others. Instructors can see overviews of courses, compare courses, and (ideally at least) identify and help struggling students.
  - Functionalities
    - **What will Analytics tell me about my course?**. Analytics include four main areas: student activity, assignments, grades, and student analytics. They will show you how well your students are interacting with your course and help you evaluate performance.
       - View Activity Analytics
       - View Assignments Analytics
       - View Grades Analytics
       - View Overview of Student Analytics
       - Sort Student Analytics
       - For detail, please see http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/66792-what-will-analytics-tell-me-about-my-course#!prettyPhoto
    - **What will Analytics tell me about my student?**. Student Analytics include four main areas:
       - View activity for the student: view student information and view participation. 
       - View responsiveness of messaging (communication) from the student to instructor and instructor to student.
       - View assignments to see if the student is at-risk or not.
       - View the student's grades.
       - For detail, please see http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/66793-what-will-analytics-tell-me-about-my-student#!prettyPhoto
==== Civitas Learning ====
  - url http://www.civitaslearning.com
  - Introduction: We’re on a mission to help every college student learn well and graduate on time. As students pursue their educations, they tell their stories in the data they leave behind. We see that information — captured in higher education databases — as an untapped resource to help millions of students. The stories collected there capture students’ decisions, their learning journeys, and their academic outcomes. We analyze them to generate personalized, real-time recommendations that inform decisions, big and small, across the student lifecycle.
  - Functionalities:
       - **Unlocking the Stories**. Higher education institutions have never had the tools to put education data to use. This information often sits in silos, locked away in disconnected databases where students and educators can only use it in limited ways. Our technology and expertise allow us to unify this data and analyze it to unlock its potential — bringing the right information to students, faculty, advisors, and administrators in just the right way. Our platform enables us to ingest data from learning management systems, student information systems, and other sources, then build school-specific predictive models that discover hidden connections and identify key decision points that affect student success.
       - **Using the Stories.** Our products deliver current, personalized, data-informed advice to the front lines of higher education. Students, faculty, advisors, and administrators interact with these clean, user-friendly apps, which distill deep analytical insights into straightforward, actionable guidance. By helping to improve a million small decisions across a college or university, we enable big improvements across the institution. Using our recommendations:
          - students can easily select the best courses and degree plans for themselves, and identify ideal support resources to achieve their goals
          - faculty and advisors increase student engagement, understand which students are at risk, and know the right time to intervene
          - administrators analyze student performance, correctly identify which investments are working, and forecast needs for staffing, programs, and courses
        - **Improving Academic Outcomes**. Forward-thinking colleges and universities are already using our products to achieve big goals in course completion, persistence, and other areas of student success. We are committed to building this community of schools and learning together to find out which decisions and practices work best to improve student learning — not anecdotally, but based on the richest data available within and across institutions.
==== Junyo ====
  - url http://junyo.com/
  - Introduction: Junyo leverage the Power of Data and Analytics to Improve the Education Sector. Junyo develops innovative technology solutions that make sense of the data available to educational suppliers, schools, teachers and students. Our premise is straightforward: we’re committed to improving the educational marketplace and ultimately the individual learning process.
  - Big Data and Real-Time Learning Analytics: We deeply believe real-time data analytics must play a critical role in 21st century education. The products we are developing will enable participants across the educational sector to develop better solutions that improve the overall educational experience.  Our experience building blended-learning platforms for leading K5 schools provides us unique teacher and classroom insights.  Our EdLights market-intelligence platforms empowers publishers and educational suppliers to deliver the right solution to the right schools at the right time.  Our next products under development will harness the enormous amount of data now available to students and help them make sense of it. The result will be measurable classroom improvement, higher motivation and greater market efficiency.
  - Junyo Believes Data Analytics Will:
     - Deliver real-time feedback across the educational sector to help deliver solutions that will positively impact learning
     - Empower suppliers, administrators, and schools to evaluate the effectiveness of their solutions and stay focused on improving student learning results
     - Determine opportunities and pinpoint areas of needed change and guide resource allocation
     - Confirm or discredit assumptions about districts, schools, school practices and student results
     - Avoid one-size-fits-all and quick solutions
==== Knewton ====
  - url http://www.knewton.com/about/
  - Introduction: Knewton is an infrastructure platform that makes it possible for anyone to build the world’s most powerful adaptive learning applications. Knewton technology can be added to new or existing digital learning products. Every Knewton-enhanced product provides practical analytics for instructors. Knewton recommendations can be implemented to accommodate a variety of course flows.
  - Functionalities: 
       - Analytics Only: Knewton analytics provides insight into each student's performance and the quality of educational content.
       - Adaptive Practice: In addition to analytics, Knewton provides students with targeted recommendations for extra help assignments and assessments to supplement primary coursework.
       - Fully Adaptive Coursework: Knewton recommendations determine each student's flow through course material. Particularly well-suited for fully online courses, this implementation includes analytics and emphasizes true competency-based learning.
==== AUS Eadvisor ====
  - url https://eadvisor.asu.edu/
  - Functionalities:
     - Choosing a major
        - search a major/ by name, relevant words
        - compare majors
        - support transfer students show how their current community college courses will fit into the degree requirements of any ASU degree
        - offers five exploratory majors
     - Choosing Courses
        - keep up to date course information
        - the departments described the sequences of courses required for each major and identified the ones that are critical in diagnosing who is unlikely to succeed in. if students do bad in important class, the system will flag that individual for additional academic support and offer advice on choosing a different program. 
        - identify the best course sequence to match their skills
        - If students want to study subjects that are unrelated to their majors, the system makes them confront the conflict. If a student’s performance does not predict success, the advisor, using the system, can identify other courses of study for which the individual is better suited, based on the experience of many other students.
        - constantly updating information, ensuring that each student’s record matches the criteria for success, and alerting advisors that students need personal attention exactly when they need it. So rather than waiting for a cumulative judgment at the end of their sophomore year, students continuously know whether they are on their way to success in their chosen major or whether they should reevaluate their goals.
        - advisor can focus on improving the student's chances of success.
    - Advisor tools
        - Online tools and reports enable advisors to monitor the progress of each student assigned to them and to focus their attention on those who require help. In this way, they can effectively support a large number of advisees
    - Scheduling Courses
        - The system has complete information on every student’s major, courses completed, and courses needed. It knows which courses will be required for the next semester for all students, as well as which of these are critical and must be provided on time.
        - It also calculates how many seats are needed the next semester in every critical course. 
    - Monitoring programs, students, and advisors
        - manage degree map
        - The eAdvisor tools also allow the university to monitor the work of the academic advisors.
        - The university also monitors dashboard usage. Whenever new computer systems are introduced, some employees continue to rely on obsolete paper processes rather than learn the new routines.
    - Supporting Students 
        - consolidates all student information  includes my ASU usage 
===== Related Material =====
  - http://elearning-analytics.blogspot.hk/
  - http://hackeducation.com/

===== Related Tools =====
  - Keel
     - url:http://www.keel.es/
     - Introduction: KEEL is an open source (GPLv3) Java software tool to assess evolutionary algorithms for Data Mining problems including regression, classification, clustering, pattern mining and so on. It contains a big collection of classical knowledge extraction algorithms, preprocessing techniques (training set selection, feature selection, discretization, imputation methods for missing values, etc.), Computational Intelligence based learning algorithms, including evolutionary rule learning algorithms based on different approaches (Pittsburgh, Michigan and IRL, ...), and hybrid models such as genetic fuzzy systems, evolutionary neural networks, etc. It allows us to perform a complete analysis of any learning model in comparison to existing ones, including a statistical test module for comparison. Moreover, KEEL has been designed with a double goal: research and educational. For a detailed description, see the section 'Description' on the left menu.