[DG: Teaching & Learning] Question - Anyone Tracking Faculty Activity in Courses?

[Gregory Guthrie]

David,
Yes - we have a similar interest and goal - and for it we have developed a reporting system that tracks students and faculty participation in site visits, forum messages and replies, and assignments across the weeks of a course.

Our system is setup for Distance Education, so reports by weeks across a course but could be easily adapted for other reporting periods.

One important goal is also to be able to track participation in a course for Federal Financial aid reasons, where the institution is legally obligated to monitor course participation, and the date of last participation if they become inactive. (There are legal guidelines on what constitutes participation.)

The way it works is that it started by using exports of data from various sitestats reports pasted into an Excel spreadsheet for reporting, but then I converted to have the spreadsheet use VBA database queries for the equivalent data, and then summarizes into tables by student, faculty and weekly progress and participation.

We later then expanded this so that DE and other faculty can generate a report from a web-page, which lists their Sakai courses, and then it invokes the Excel reporting system, saves as a pdf, and emails to the person.

I have since also created a set of web-services so that we can collect the data directly from Sakai using the pre-defined reports, and avoid database accesses (but not yet replaced the SQL queries with these). The system still has the Excel reporting tool which makes it a bit more complex, but is such a simple and good reporting and summary tool that we have not yet been motivated to re-code all of that reporting using a lower level language like Java.

I can send you some samples of reports, or code, or whatever you might find useful.

We were surprised to not find any such automated tools for this, especially the federal financial aid reporting requirements, although I think LongSight has added some tools for this which are available only on their servers - so I do not know any details since we run our own installation. Again I think your description of a hierarchical reporting tool for faculty, departments, and institution are important, and our next step is to create something similar - currently we only report on individual courses.

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From: pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of David Eveland
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 2:50 PM
To: pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: [DG: Teaching & Learning] Question - Anyone Tracking Faculty Activity in Courses?

All,

Sorry if this isn't the right context for this.

We're presently looking to gather some data on the level and kind of involvement our faculty have in their online courses, and are familiar with the Statistics tool in Sakai to gather just this type of information.

However, we're also looking at being able to provide a more responsive engagement with faculty - if for example they're not remaining engaged or active in their online courses (as our contract spells out).  One way to check for this is to use the Statistics tool in every course an instructor is teaching in in the current term, and then relay that information to that faculty member's respective dean or school.

Another way would be to have a service that simply looks into the current term's courses for just this sort of data and notifies those deans accordingly if (say) the instructor hasn't engaged with a particular course for more than 4 days.

Any thoughts are helpful.
[cid:image002.png at 01D06BC7.EAECB630]<http://www.johnsonu.edu/>-
Dave E. | Johnson University
865.251.2320
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