WHO'S LISTENING?
Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette,
Indiana, have developed a way to track the
effectiveness of online learning programs, speaker
presentations, and websites. The team developed
an algorithm that sorts digital data and formats it
into a two-dimensional time-and-space heat map.
The algorithm takes the date and IP address
information and transforms it into a data set that
can be used by an image program to create the
heat map. The map is a grid of colored boxes, which
visually show information that occurs at specific
times and locations. Educators could refer to the
heat map and data information to determine if
online lectures or supplemental materials are
being used in classrooms. Speakers could use the
technology to see if people think their work is valuable
enough to download. Businesses could apply
the technology to track website effectiveness.
The technology allows “organizations and businesses
to quickly recognize behavioral patterns and
trends in the data,” says Dwight McKay, senior data
science engineer for information technology.
Researchers began developing the technology
for Purdue’s Network for Computational Nanotechnology’s
nanoHUB site, a scientific cloud-computing
environment. They used the algorithm
technology to determine which of nanoHUB’s
more than 6,000 content items were being used in
education through the identification of classroom
groups. The National Science Foundation provided
funding for part of the research.
Researchers have worked with the Purdue
Office of Technology Commercialization to register
copyright protection for the source code. The
technology is available for interested partners to
license. Contact Chris Adam at
[email protected]
COMPARING COMPETENCIES
Coursera for Business, part
of the global online learning
platform Coursera, has released
Skills Benchmarking, a new
tool that organizations can use to compare the skills of their employees to the
skills of employees at other companies in their
industries. The benchmarking tool also will help
companies identify top performers on their staff
in specific competency areas, as well as compare
their workforces based on criteria such as industry,
geographic region, and company size. The data will
provide companies with more information about
their workers’ “talent profiles,” including “where the
gaps are, and how best to close them,” according to
a released statement.
BETTER TEACHING WITH DATA
Turnitin, a California-based company that
provides plagiarism-detection tools, and Unizin, a
Texas-based nonprofit consortium of 25 research
institutions promoting accessible and affordable
digital education, have joined forces to equip
college and university instructors with more data
on how students write and revise their work.
Through this partnership, Turnitin’s Originality
Check software will generate and send data to the
Unizin Data Platform; these combined data sets
will help professors detect plagiarism, predict likely
student outcomes, better customize instruction,
and identify areas where students need more
targeted support in their writing.
Faculty currently can access the combined data
via their IT offices, explains Brad Zircher, Unizin’s
director of business development. “In collaboration
with our members, we are determining how to
securely provide faculty access directly to the data
with a workbench of preferred tools,” says Zircher.
“As the use of data for learning analytics matures,
the Unizin Data Platform will support a variety of
data consumption patterns optimized for different
use cases.”
In another bid to provide faculty with data related
to student learning, Turnitin recently announced
its acquisition of Gradescope, an assessment
platform that draws on artificial intelligence to help
faculty grade student work more efficiently. In addition,
the platform’s AI-assisted grading technology
offers professors greater insight into how well their
students are learning, so that they can give students
quicker and more customized feedback.