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Archive for the ‘Metrics’ Category
Logging learning center attendance using MS-Exchange Calendars
2014/08/27
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- Over the years, I had to find a number of solutions for monitoring student attendance in the learning center, by repurposing existing infrastructure (there are dedicated solutions which, however, are often too costly for a departmental center, or not shared well). Here is another idea:
- We’ve used the existing campus-wide MS-Exchange infrastructure’s resource mailboxes for room booking and equipment circulation.
- We have creatively repurposed this infrastructure for managing the staffing of “offices” (center help desk and tutors). Here we needed to allow conflicts:
- multiple students staff the help desk.
- 1 tutor staffs the “office”- 1 additional student can book the tutor.
- Additionally, we set up a time clock system, based on an Excel Macro, to prevent cheating:
- Only the person logging in can sign up to the resource;
- while only the help desk can provide the time clock value.
- It looks like that a similar setup could be extended to support the common requirement that students, while taking a certain course, spend a certain amount of time per week working in the learning center:
- which has been traditionally handled using paper-based sign-in-sheets or, at best, spreadsheets.
- With digital input, the data could be basis for analytics and visualizations, taking advantage of existing tools like MS-Calendaranalytics.
- Such a system would, however, require creation of resource calendar per course section that need to monitor learning center attendance. However, this needs to be done only once and would be reusable, since data can be filtered by input time, as long as no entirely new courses/sections come online.
- But hasn’t mandatory weekly learning center attendance been made obsolete by ubiquitous computing and the web?
- Definitely in some of its more antiquated forms: I have worked at institutions where the computer-savvy students attended the learning center once at the beginning of the term to copy all the learning materials on the network share onto a thumb drive, and I would not want to force somebody to come to the learning center continuously for such a trivial purpose as accessing files on a not-web-accessible network share.
- However, there seems to be a lot of unmined pedagogical value in learning center group work and blended instruction (under tutor supervision), like in a homework emporium (provided your program is big enough to have continuous tutor support and sufficient learner overlap).
Mapping of Language Student Locations using PowerView
2014/03/09
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- What do our language students call home? Based on a pivot-table that counts zip codes, let PowerView tell you, which is can now distributed as a free add-in for Excel 2013 Prof, but you need to enable it (under File / Options / Add-Ins).
- Comes with a nifty zoom:
- Click, then Hover a data bubble for more info;
- Like with Bing Maps Visualization, the weighting is surprising:
Mapping of Language Student Locations using Bing Maps
2014/03/09
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- What do our language students call home? Based on a pivot-table that counts zip codes, let Bing Maps tell you, a default add-in easily accessible in the insert section of the ribbon:
- Note a Limitation: Bing Maps max 100 data points.
- So we limited to zip codes with at least 15 students (which returns just below 100 zip codes).
- Also note, the Bing maps app cannot be increased beyond a certain size (below is the maximum).
- Finally, note that the visualization does have a weight indicator, but it seems imperfect:
- Here is how data (type) input errors get handled (duplicates override the original):
- Fix your data, the reload from the upper right unfoldable menu:
- Voilà:
Summary of the LRC main classroom use in year 2012/3
2013/06/22
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(Tentative while experimenting with Calendaranalytics).
Summary of my work calendar in year 2012/13
2013/06/22
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(Tentative while experimenting with Calendaranalytics).
Categories: Analytics, Charts, Metrics, reports, Visualizations
calendaring, ms-calendaranalytics
First results with MS-Calendar Analytics for learning center management
2013/06/22
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- You can use the controls on the right to drill into the detail by selecting one or more
- Aliases,
- Attendees,
- Time periods
- Status.
- The graphs on the left and in the center will automatically reflect your selection on the right.
- These results lead to more questions. E.g. why is this tripod so popular?
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Lesson learnt: Now it comes back to haunt us that we block broken or MIA equipment from users attempting to book it by making it look “busy” with an 24/7 “Appointment“. However, It should however be possible to filter out such appointments, versus “meeting requests”.
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