The student engagement team at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) won an Advance Higher Education award. The university beat 14 other universities who all won a collaborative award for teaching excellence and improvement to learning support.
Much of NTU’s success can be attributed to their learning analytics platform. The platform is known throughout the institution as the Student Dashboard. The dashboard uses powerful analytic tools to create unique user profiles for each student at the university. The tools collect data such as each student’s use of learning resources and their performance on assignments. The dashboard has been running since 2014 and has measured around 1.7 million student log-ins.
Professor Eunice Simmons, NTU, explained the success of the dashboard, “Our focus on engagement, not demographics or risk of failure, and the sharing of data between students and staff has created a positive, nuanced application of technology to support learning.”
The data collected by the dashboard enables educators to understand how learners interact with their studies. In fact, research using the data has found a strong relationship between student outcomes and engagement (as shown by the dashboard). The system can also use the information collected to notify educators of students who are at risk of dropping out or falling behind.
NTU’s student engagement dashboard was developed with Solutionpath. The team say that both student and staff engagement have played critical roles in the platform’s development. When asked about the dashboard, Professor Eunice Simmons commented, ““There is no doubt that NTU’s award-winning student dashboard is changing the learning and teaching landscape.” Adding, ““Our focus on engagement, not demographics or risk of failure, and the sharing of data between students and staff has created a positive, nuanced application of technology to support learning.”
