{"id":9161,"date":"2017-04-26T15:17:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T19:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/2017\/blog-data-driven-course-improvement\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T13:27:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:27:58","slug":"blog-data-driven-course-improvement-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2017\/blog-data-driven-course-improvement-2-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Data-driven course improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<section class=\"w-screen px-6 cu-section cu-section--white ml-offset-center md:px-8 lg:px-14\">\n    <div class=\"space-y-6 cu-max-w-child-5xl  md:space-y-10 cu-prose-first-last\">\n\n            <div class=\"cu-textmedia flex flex-col lg:flex-row mx-auto gap-6 md:gap-10 my-6 md:my-12 first:mt-0 max-w-5xl\">\n        <div class=\"justify-start cu-textmedia-content cu-prose-first-last\" style=\"flex: 0 0 100%;\">\n            <header class=\"font-light prose-xl cu-pageheader md:prose-2xl cu-component-updated cu-prose-first-last\">\n                                    <h1 class=\"cu-prose-first-last font-semibold !mt-2 mb-4 md:mb-6 relative after:absolute after:h-px after:bottom-0 after:bg-cu-red after:left-px text-3xl md:text-4xl lg:text-5xl lg:leading-[3.5rem] pb-5 after:w-10 text-cu-black-700 not-prose\">\n                        Blog: Data-driven course improvement\n                    <\/h1>\n                \n                                \n                            <\/header>\n\n                    <\/div>\n\n            <\/div>\n\n    <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n<p><em>By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I start to become more familiar with cuLearn, I realize that there is a lot of course data that can be useful for improving the learning environment for my students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Without a doubt, the ability to perform complex queries in cuLearn is limited. For example, obtaining a list of students who made no more than two quiz attempts within a specific time period simply cannot be done without external scripts at the moment.&nbsp;However, I have found the online quiz statistics per quiz question to be tremendously helpful in identifying potential weaknesses of my students or deficiencies of the course content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the past two years, I have encountered a few surprises from online quiz results. What I thought were straightforward questions turned out to be challenging for a substantial number of students. For my online course <em>Linear Algebra I<\/em> (MATH 1107), I have on two occasions added new sections to the lecture notes as a result of what I saw in the quiz statistics.&nbsp;Since then, questions from students on these topics have reduced dramatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have also discovered that requiring students to submit their written assignments electronically has been beneficial in many ways.&nbsp;For instance, the risk of losing assignment submissions is practically nonexistent. In addition, not only do I have a record of the breakdown of marks for each submission, I also have a record of the actual work along with any comments from the markers.&nbsp; I have at times gone back to assignments from previous terms to see the types of mistakes students made and adjusted my teaching accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now that big data in education seems to be in fashion, it may be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/answer-sheet\/wp\/2016\/05\/09\/big-data-was-supposed-to-fix-education-it-didnt-its-time-for-small-data\/?utm_term=.99ca01b89b6f\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">prudent to take a step back<\/a> and see if such a heavy-handed approach is really necessary. My experience suggests that just looking at course data is already quite helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics As I start to become more familiar with cuLearn, I realize that there is a lot of course data that can be useful for improving the learning environment for my students. Without a doubt, the ability to perform complex queries in cuLearn is limited. For [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40175,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions\/40175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}