Using Analytics to Examine Course Design and Identify Effective Practices

UMBC has long had an interest in identifying the most active Blackboard courses for the purposes of identifying effective practices and practitioners. Participation in the field trial for Bb Analytics for Learn (BA4L) has expanded our ability to explore the LMS at a much finer scale. We investigated how LMS course attributes (e.g., tool use, folder depth, activity) differ between the various instruction modes and for faculty who completed our hybrid training program. Additionally we examined non-LMS data (e.g., clicker and classroom data projector use) in order to get a more complete picture of the overall learning environment.

Learning Objectives:
* Learn the various course design differences we discovered between courses with different modes of instruction and between faculty who have completed our training program and those who have not
* How we used BA4L to discover effective hybrid practitioners (some of whom were totally off our radar) and how we used it to analyze our usage and scheduling of SMART rooms