Using Learning Management Systems to Support Students' Collaborative Learning in Higher Education

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are web-based systems for the distribution, management and retrieval of course materials, and to support communication between students and instructors. A LMS can also support peer collaboration by providing students with the capacity to create their own project sites. In this paper we present data from system logs, surveys, and interviews to investigate how one such system, CTools, is used by students at a large public university to facilitate peer learning.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108483/1/CSCL_2007_Project_Sites.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108483/2/CSCL_2007_Project_Sites_Poster.pdfDescription of CSCL_2007_Project_Sites.pdf : Main articleDescription of CSCL_2007_Project_Sites_Poster.pdf : Poster Fil

Supporting the Dissertation Process with Grad Tools

Heavy use of an online collaboration and learning environment (CLE) at a large research university led the graduate school to consider how a CLE might support dissertation committees. The project team conducted focus groups with 38 student, faculty, and administrative staff to determine system requirements. Results showed that users would benefit from a tool designed to facilitate the dissertation process, especially if social norms and work-benefit disparity issues were directly addressed. The development team designed and built a "dissertation navigator" in our CLE. 645 users have adopted Grad Tools, suggesting that some traditional groupware design challenges have been overcome.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108481/1/p144-lotia.pdfDescription of p144-lotia.pdf : Main articl

What Happens to the Scores? The Effects of Learning Management Systems Use on Students' Course Evaluations

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are web-based systems that allow instructors and/or students to share materials, submit and return assignments, and communicate online. In this study, we explored the possible effects of LMS use on students' assessments of courses, instructor effectiveness, and their own learning. We examined the relationship between instructors' LMS use over two academic terms and three items from students’ course evaluations, and used the results from a user survey to inform our understanding of the relationship between course ratings and LMS use. Findings suggest that students do not rate courses more highly when instructors use LMSs. However, survey data shows that students value LMSs but perhaps for reasons different from instructors’. As instructors gain experience with tools within LMSs that foster interaction outside the classroom, their use of these systems may lead to improvements in course evaluation scores.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108482/1/AERA_2007_Eval_Paper.pd

Cultivating Institutional Capacities for Learning Analytics

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138371/1/he20243.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138371/2/he20243_am.pd

Learning Analytics and iSchools: What, Why, & Worries

This SIE is aimed at members of the iSchool community who are interested in learning about Learning Analytics (LA) and thinking through how this arena for Big Data is relevant to the intellectual agenda(s) undertaken by iSchools. We expect that attendees will leave the session with an understanding of what learning analytics is, why LA is relevant to iSchools, and how we can design structures that support the ethical use of these tools. We will reach the broader conference community by designing the SIE to be spread over two days where the participants will query other conference colleagues between the two sessions and report back at the second session. The activity between sessions will be based on ethical scenarios described below supported by simple and specific tasks that participants will be given.ye

Increasing Academic Success in Undergraduate Engineering Education using Learning Analytics: A Design-Based Research Project

This paper describes the first iteration of a design-based research project that developed an early warning system (EWS) for an undergraduate engineering mentoring program. Using near real-time data from a university’s learning management system, we provided academic mentors with timely and targeted data on students’ developing academic progress. Over two design phases, we developed an EWS and examined how mentors used the EWS in their support activities. Findings from this iteration of the project point to the importance of locating analytics-based interventions within and across multiple activity systems that link mentors’ interactions with an EWS and their interventions with students.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106032/1/aera2012_krumm_learning_analytics.pd

Article Discovery Working Group Final Report

The University Library conducted a six-month investigation of article discovery tools. As a result of these studies, the Library is pleased to have selected Summon as the article discovery tool for the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses. The library launched our Summon interface as ArticlesPlus on September 27, 2010. The “Article Discovery Working Group,” a task force charged with researching and recommending an article discovery mechanism, completed two reports. 1) The Article Discovery Working Group’s Final Report [PDF, 8.7MB], includes sections on: - Development of personas to help us put our evaluation into user-specific context; - An evaluation of Metalib, Google Scholar, and Summon with regard to these user-specific criteria; - A survey of the campus on article discovery preferences that yielded more than 950 responses; and - Recommendations to select Summon, based on the above inputs. 2) The Article Discovery Working Group's Supplemental Report [PDF, 700KB] exploring two additional areas: - An exploration how much of the University of Michigan’s article content is included in the Summon product; and - User studies exploring how University of Michigan faculty and students might perceive the Summon product were it available.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116831/1/final-report.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116831/2/supplemental-report.pdfDescription of final-report.pdf : Article Discovery Working Group's Final ReportDescription of supplemental-report.pdf : Article Discovery Working Group's Supplemental Repor

Psychology

The Internet explosion and broad interest in collaborative technology have driven increased interest in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Historically, behavioral research on CSCW applications has reflected a strong influence from ethnomethodology. This article argues that the CSCW community should adopt a stronger orientation to other social science disciplines, particularly psychology. Greater attention to the psychological literature provides three benefits. First, psychologists offer well-validated principles about human behavior in group and organizational contexts that are relevant to CSCW research. Second, psychologists offer reliable and proven measures of human behavior that, if adopted by CSCW researchers, can provide a uniform basis for comparison across studies. Finally, psychologists offer data collection and analysis methods that identify salient and generalizable features of human behavior, which may lead to the development of universal principles of CSCW design.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68835/2/10.1177_089443939801600106.pd