TutorsTime: Measuring and Visualising Students' Interaction and Progress

Learner analytics have the potential to transform the way we measure impact and outcomes in learning environments. They enable us to observe students' engagement with learning materials and labs and provide useful insights into how they are progressing with the course.

They can also be used to indicate students who may be at risk of dropping out. In our experience, this is especially true when analytics are used in the first days and weeks of a programme to highlight students who have not yet engaged with course material. Interventions at this stage can lead to enhanced student retention rates.

Waterford Institute of Technology's Higher Diploma in Computer Science uses a custom content management system called Tutors in place of the traditional learning management system. This year we have created learner analytics system for Tutors, we've called it TutorsTime.

TutorsTime records each student interaction on Tutors. It gives staff visibility over the number of visits to each content section and step-by-step lab on a module. It gives lecturers visibility over the amount of time students spend on each page, and a live view of students' interactions on a module.

This last feature is particularly useful for eTutors on the programme. When students have queries on course material, the eTutor can easily see if a student has visited the correct page, how long they spent on the page, and even if they are currently on the correct page.

The TutorsTime project is still in its infancy. Once matured, we hope to scale these learner analytics capabilities across the institute by integrating TutorsTime into Moodle.

In this talk we will discuss the background to the project, how TutorsTime works, and show anonymised reports to demonstrate the information TutorsTime is capable of capturing and displaying to staff.