LEARNING ANALYTICS TO SUPPORT STUDY SUCCESS BASED ON A SMALL PRIVATE ONLINE COURSE

Nowadays, educators are facing very fast technological changes, incomparable professional pressure, to which one must add the challenge of working with students with different mindsets, expectations and needs. The educational environment is continuously changing to adjust to the needs and demands of our society. Therefore, most Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have developed evaluation approaches as part of their quality assurance programs. There has been growing concern over the use of learning analysis in HEI, where many of the followers suggest that developments in this area may be helpful to address several challenges that educators are facing. The application range of the learning analytics practice is broad and diverse, including the gain of better insight into how learning occurs, the possible identification of students at risk of dropping out, the improvement of passing rates, and the possibility of providing personalized learning.

The purpose of the current paper is to describe an experiment to improve student engagement, educational achievement and the learning environment through a small private online course (SPOC). The paper also presents a description of the course structure and contents in a learning management system. The sample of this study, from a second-year higher education course on Financial Mathematics, consisted of 257 students, enrolled each Winter semester since 2014/2015. Traditional lectures were complemented by the application of pedagogical principles that support the inverted learning and online support through a SPOC.

The effectiveness of the methodology used is revealed by the results obtained.