#LAK12 Gamifying SNAPP

In a recent blog post over at David Jennings' Quickened with the Firewater blog David asks: "What would happen if we put learners in charge of analysing their own data about their performance?"

Here's how it could happen with SNAPP, which is a software tool that helps online instructors analyze the communication patterns among students who use the LMS' communication tool:

• the instructor would allow communication to happen using the LMS, perhaps providing some task guidance or parameters to inspire the online discussion.



• The network visualization (like the one at the right, from the SNAPP group) could be shared with the students, who would use the visualization to help them think critically about how communication unfolded and what they individually added to the discussion.



• Learners could then be challenged to change the visualization by changing their own communication patterns as a group, thereby gamifying the system.

Learners would gain insight into their group communication processes and play with different communication roles. This might be especially useful in a management or communication course, but such insights would be valuable to anyone no matter their course of study. But what learners might also gain, in addition to learning about communication principles, is insight into how such systems can be manipulated, and how the systems might also be used to manipulate learners -- both worthy learning goals.

P.S. thank you Shane Dawson, for a fantastic presentation yesterday about SNAPP for the learning analytics massively open online course!

#LAK12 UMBC MyActivity vs. Purdue Signals: BEATDOWN

How do the UMBC and Purdue systems compare? I watched the video demo of University of Maryland Baltimore County's CheckMyActivity analytics tool and compared it to John Campbell's presentation on Purdue's Signals, as well as Kimberly Arnold's EDUCAUSE piece on Signals.
Intuitiveness: SIGNALS. The use of color instantly symbolizes student grade status. The traffic light symbol is easy to understand and a powerful message and is really the genius of this system. The UMBC system, on the other hand, leverages the functionality of the course management system but, in so doing, also retains the somewhat IT-centric wording ("hits", "sessions," "generate report" and "get gradebook items") and the non-intuitive structure of the reports. It was difficult for me to quickly ascertain which column on the CheckMyActivity reports were the most important to focus in on for student performance (average hits per user? sessions?) ; so I'm sure that students probably have the same difficulty. Plus, you still must interpret what the numbers mean. You don't have to do that in Signals.

Visual Appeal: SIGNALS. The red/green/yellow colors are attractive and the interface looked more streamlined than UMBC's system . Plus, they have an attractive logo, and that's always a plus.

In-Your-Face quotient: SIGNALS by a landslide. Students have to take action to access the UMBC tool; with Signals, no additional action is necessary past logging in to the CMS, which they will do anyway. This is a limitation of UMBC's system. In fact, 16% of students in one course who responded to a survey said that they had never used UMBC CheckMyActivity at all. The fact that the red, yellow, and green lights are staring students in the face every time they log on to the CMS makes Signals impossible to ignore and therefore, students are probably more likely to follow up on the instructor's remediation suggestions.



Model-Building Quality: UNKNOWN. I would really like to see what data models lie behind each system, but I haven't found that information yet. UPDATE 2/9/2012: I suppose CheckMyActivity does not actually have any models upon which it is built. The students are only seeing the raw data of their log-ins to the course compared to the log-ins of people with grades of A, B, C, etc. Therefore UMBC's CheckMyActivity tool would be an example of "transaction only" level of sophistication rather than Purdue Signals' "predictive modeling" level of sophistication.