Abstract:

The Faculty Innovation Center (FIC) and the Office of Strategic Academic Initiatives (SAI) at the University of Texas at Austin are collaborate on a pilot project to build and test a system for collecting student learning data through existing Canvas tools and visualizing this information in relation to various sets of institutional data and program outcomes. At this time, our university does not systematically collect student- and course-level data on student learning. Collection of program-level student learning data takes place, but there are wide variations in the quality and consistency of the practices use to do so. Further, current data collection practices constrain the ability of programs to use those data for improvement. We anticipate that this system will accomplish the following goals:

• Simplify the process of collecting student and course-level student learning data
• Empower faculty to track student achievement on their course objectives and better refine their pedagogical approaches
• Allow programs to track and refine program learning outcomes across multiple semesters
• Enable the institution to track achievement on institutional-level outcomes (e.g., sustainability or critical thinking) and/or Texas Core Curriculum objectives
• Effect the correlation between student demographic and institutional data with evaluation of student skill development within individual programs.

The integration of these data with student information systems (SIS) data will enable the tracking of learning objectives longitudinally and by demographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity, first-generation status, etc.) at the course, program, and institutional levels. Employing analytics/visualization software (whether developed with collaborative partners will be made available through existing software from our accreditation service providers) in the form of summative dashboards will provide timely, summative, and actionable information for many stakeholders across the institution.

Bio:

Dr. Matthew Russell  is an Educational Consultant in the Faculty Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Matthew Russell (Ph.D.) supports course development projects and coordinates resources in support of numerous curricular projects. He works with faculty to plan and develop online and blended courses in Canvas, and assists faculty with the development of projects related to instructional improvement and related strategies. In the FIC, Matthew has helped developed the online instructional resources, Deeper Dive Instructional Guides (DDIG), by designing them within Canvas. He is the primary contact for the "Architecting Online Courses" DDIG. He has designed and consults on the use of "CViz," a curriculum visualization tool available to UT departments and programs. He also coordinates the International Office's five-year Global Classroom initiative in the FIC, providing instructional guidance for intercultural learning and technical guidance as it relates to using online technologies to connect with partner institutions abroad. At his previous institution, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Matthew was a blended and online course design consultant, lecturer in Comparative Literature, and founding co-director of the UWM Libraries Digital Humanities Lab. He remains engaged in issues related to developments in the digital humanities as well as conversant with new and emerging tools in digital scholarship. He welcomes the opportunity to provide in-class workshops that introduce educational technologies for students in courses at UT. Matthew currently teaches in the Liberal Arts Honors program at UT-Austin. He is an experienced instructor of face-to-face, online and blended courses. He has presented at numerous conferences, delivered workshops, published research, and been awarded grants for the use of instructional technologies and strategies.