Time: 02:00 PM
Location: CIC Ideation Studio, UTS Building 22
Ever wondered how to provide your students with individual feedback and recommendations on their learning progress both quickly and easily?
On Thursday June 22, the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) hosted a hands-on workshop to demonstrate the potential applications of OnTask software for UTS staff. OnTask can be used to integrate data on student activity and learning progress, and automate the mailing out of personalised feedback to your students, composed by yourself based on your personal experience with your class.
Event details:
Date: Thursday, June 22
Time: 2:00 – 4:00pm
Location: Building 10, Level 2, Room 320
What is OnTask?
Across higher education, students are always asking for more timely, more personal feedback — but as all academics know, this is time-consuming to provide. However, the combination of digital data with technology to personalise communications holds significant promise to reduce academic workload.
For several years at UTS, a system has been invented and used by Dr Jurgen Schulte (MaPS, Science) to provide hundreds of personalised feedback emails to students on their progress each week. These are well received by students, and the impact is documented. The national significance of this work was recognised by the Office for Learning & Teaching, with a grant to several universities to develop such approaches as an open source platform. Science and CIC are partners on the OnTask Learning project: http://ontasklearning.org
OnTask aims to provide instructors with an easy to manage feedback tool that gathers and assesses data about students’ activities throughout the semester. Academics design personalised feedback depending on different patterns that they frequently encounter in student activity, with suggestions to improve students’ learning strategies. By providing frequent suggestions about specific tasks in the subject, students are empowered to adjust their learning progressively. By automating the assessment and communication process, instructors can provide more meaningful feedback to individual students with little impact on their personal workload.
This workshop introduces the OnTask platform in order to raise awareness of its availability, and elicit feedback from colleagues on how they could use it, and how to improve it.
Workshop leads: Jurgen Schulte (Science), Roberto Martinez-Maldonado and Simon Buckingham Shum (CIC)
Target audience: UTS academics interested the role of technology in improving feedback; academics interested in the role of data science in education (esp. rule-based systems); Learning Designers interested in automated feedback