If an instructor is#Teaching with #Twitter, how do they know whether it’s meeting their teaching objectives?
This is one of the basic questions that researchers at our lab set out to answer in a new year long study. The result from the study, “Learning Analytics Dashboard for Teaching with Twitter” was presented earlier this month at the HICSS – 53 Conference.
Abstract:
As social media takes root in our society, more University instructors are incorporating platforms like Twitter into their classroom. However, few of the current Learning Analytics (LA) systems process social media data for instructional interventions and evaluation. As a result, instructors who are using social media cannot easily assess their students’ learning progress or use the data to adjust their lessons in real time. We surveyed 54 university instructors to better understand how they use social media in the classroom; we then used these results to design and evaluate our own Twitter-centric LA dashboard. The overarching goals for this project were to 1) assist instructors in determining whether their particular use of Twitter met their teaching objectives, and 2) help system designers navigate the nuance of designing LA dashboards for social media platforms.
Conference Proceedings:
An open access copy of this new study is available in the conference proceedings:
Gruzd, A., & Conroy, N. (2020, January). Learning Analytics Dashboard for Teaching with Twitter. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Slideshare:
Live Demo:
A live demo of the dashboard is available at: dashboard.socialmediadata.org/educhat. Note: For demonstration purposes, the dashboard currently analyzes tweets from the #educhat hashtag.
Source Code:
Also, if you are interested in building a version of this #LearningAnalytics dashboard for your class, here’s the link to the source code on Github.