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Posts Tagged ‘student-attendance’

Logging learning center attendance using MS-Exchange Calendars

2014/08/27 Leave a comment
  1. 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:
  2. We’ve used the existing campus-wide MS-Exchange infrastructure’s resource mailboxes for room booking and equipment circulation.
  3. We have creatively repurposed this infrastructure for managing the staffing of “offices” (center help desk and tutors). Here we needed to allow conflicts:
    1. multiple students staff the help desk.
    2. 1 tutor staffs the “office”- 1 additional student can book the tutor.
    3. Additionally, we set up a time clock system, based on an Excel Macro, to prevent cheating:
      1. Only the person logging in can sign up to the resource;
      2. while only the help desk can provide the time clock value.
  4. 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:
    1. which has been traditionally handled using paper-based sign-in-sheets or, at best, spreadsheets.
    2. With digital input, the data could be basis for analytics and visualizations, taking advantage of existing tools like MS-Calendaranalytics.
    3. 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.
  5. But hasn’t mandatory weekly learning center attendance been made obsolete by ubiquitous computing and the web?
    1. 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.
    2. 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).
Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, Metrics Tags: , , , , , , , ,

How to take roll in class using Sanako Study 1200

2012/08/29 Leave a comment
  1. Today:
    1. I had to work on getting my Sanako classroom layouts back up after a network cutover on the first day of the academic year.
    2. I could observe a teacher new to the Sanako lab taking roll on paper, reading out each student’s name and finding the student in the classroom . This is a known good way to learn to put a face to a students’ name. Once that is done (and maybe could be done also faster using student thumbnails in university computer systems like the LMS), one can save teaching time taking roll doing the following :
  2. At the beginning of each of your class meetings:
    1. You cannot start a sanako class before your students have logged in and their sanako student clients have started up – that is the first I always ask my students to do.
    2. In the initial Sanako tutor startup dialogue, open an empty class.
    3. Wait for the “corridor” to be fully populated, then select all.
    4. Have the sanako tutor populate the classroom layout.
    5. Choose menu file / save classroom layout as, and save in your tutor folder with the date as the filename.
    6. (Load your familiar class layout to actually begin your class – this will take little extra time, for Sanako tutor does not need to wait again for the Sanako student clients to start up).
  3. After the last day of classes:
    1. load each saved file into MS-Excel (as an XML table),
    2. first column will be class date, hide all columns in between that and your student login name,
    3. select and copy these 2 columns into an attendance spreadsheet (if you find a way to strip the xml wrapper, you can merge the files on the command line – after all, the classroom layout files are just plain text),
    4. in the attendance spreadsheet, calculate attendance
      1. either sort first by date, then by login name, and count attendance manually using the dates;
      2. or have Excel count for you with an array formula pasted into a third column that checks for and counts identical dates.
  4. Final thoughts: Your mileage may vary if you don’t teach all your classes in a Sanako lab – I used to and have come to appreciate an institutionally provided and maintained lab infrastructure which is stable – compared with complaints I have heard about having to rely on your students not forgetting their clickers if you want to use technology rather than class time for taking roll outside of a stable infrastructure.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-learning Tags: , , ,

Network shares for collaboration: Applications and Files

2010/03/15 Leave a comment

As explained earlier here, we have set up network shares for collaboration which you can access from your office computers.

 

Overview of shares:

If you still have textbook media files in the LLC (talk to me on how to move them into the Blackboard content system and recycle them between terms by doing a course rollover in Blackboard ), access them on drive M: (for “media”).

If you have students making audio recordings in the LLC, access them on drive S: (for “students”). A better way for doing recordings during self-access/homework is TBA.

Some useful files for management are on drive H:, in the LLC folder. Some background info is here.

Overview of files:

To access these files quickly, you can click , click , paste the path to the file, click :

 

H:\LLC\people\Sign_In_Sheet.xls   –  Attendance Meter. 

H:\LLC\scheduling\channel55-presenter\channel55.ppt – the PowerPoint displayed on the Campus TV Network channel; for the LLC (TBA: as of March 2010, computer is being swapped out, and I have to migrate my application again – stay tuned).

H:\LLC\scheduling\hallway-presenter\hallway.ppt – the PowerPoint displayed on the hallway screen outside of the LLC on MH, 4th floor.

 

The PowerPoint files – one being displayed on the 4th floor hallway computer, the other on Channel 55 Campus TV – contain sections for announcements/advertisements which you may want to edit, update and/or add to.

 

Open these files like files on your computer. Overwrite the text in the files with current information. It is strongly recommended that you add slides by copy/pasting existing slides.

 

If you need help with the PowerPoints, I trained and assessed the lab assistants through Language Learning Center Blackboard site. There should always be an assistant at the LLC desk that can help you with basic PowerPoint tasks. 

 

Your updates will not show instantaneously, but next day. I’ll check for changes in either PowerPoint file, backup the original and upload the new version over night to their respective computers.

Categories: e-infrastructure, Institution-is-Loyola-University-Maryland, Metrics Tags: , , ,

Student attendance metering: present signin.xls and perspectives

2010/01/27 Leave a comment

 

We are working on replacing the old attendance meter which is still down:

As you will remember, we have been recording attendance last term and made this data available to you on our new  network share: H:\llc\people\Sign_In_Sheet.xls. To summarize your students attendance, you can filter this data, using standard excel features.

 

New this term: To help you with this, we added an hard-coded MS-Excel auto-filter (see down-arrows in column headers): filter by course language, then number, then teacher, then the student in question , to summarize during assessment.

 

We expanded the data validation, so that we get the computer help us processing the data (sort, filter, search…).

 

Per your request, we added the course number, section and teacher columns to the sign-in sheet (to be manually updated at every term start – a poor man’s integration into the campus information system which had better not be done even by central services, but rather only purchased by them):

Individual teachers can use the built-in filters to drill down to their classes/students for advising/grading.

Individual student can be tracked, together with their time spent in the LLC:

Students enter in the green columns, mostly having to access only built-in shortcuts and selection boxes, while the other columns get updated completely automatically.

To enable students inputting their information directly, we have hacked together a dual screen system in the LLC entrance area. 

 

We will also use this dual screen system for improving other LLC services, by hooking  into central services. We will ask students with less than clear requests (“My professor wants me to do my homework here, where is it?”) to load their syllabus from blackboard and share their screen with the lab assistant, to assist with (not solve: that would need library resources, meaning professional library catalogue, library professional staff and library professional network and procedures) locating movies and other assigned learning materials.

 

For the attendance meter, this means: students can enter this information themselves; lab assistants still supervise, and collect the student ID to double check and prevent the cheating that I was approached about to fix with the prior system: signing in for friends, especially with passwords separate from university-wide passwords which there is no reason to keep secret.

 

Please note that this home-brew spreadsheet-based system is still severely limited in its functionality.

 

We could POSSIBLY (this would need setup and coordination with various central offices) automate this more, given time for the initial investment.

 

I have experimented with hooking into the swipe card system. However, students would have to be asked to swipe out also. For other reporting purposes, I have already managed to retrieve this data in this form:

 

I have experimented with recording log-in (but no log-off) data on the LLC computers (another hack) in a centrally available spreadsheet, in this format:

I have inquired about using Microsoft’s SCCM (a generic software management application not meant for monitoring learning or language learning): We could gather statistics on two LLC-specific programs: the SANAKO media player and the webbrowser.exe (both, however, are likely, but not required to be used for language learning if a student prefers to do the learning in other applications). Neither would record actual files being opened.


All of these approaches, while preventing the most blatant cheating, still would not record actual language learning activity. They do not prevent students from spending their time in the LLC doing unrelated activities (like browsing sports news or playing online games) while they can do their assigned Blackboard and Quia homework from the convenience of their residence.

It is the professional systems that have been programmed with the resources from of revenue of literally thousands of campus-wide installations that can record these language learning activities.

The Sanako language lab software contains a webbrowser.exe which can not only be remote controlled by the teacher, but also be configured to allow only browsing certain (partial) urls or disallow browsing certain urls. it is also possible to apply different policies in different situations. this facility, while part of the package your purchased with the lab, has not been set up as of yet.

 

It would require developing policies and implementing them. E.g. one could during non-class use of the LLC only allow browsing publisher websites, including Quia.com, and Blackboard.loyola.edu  and Loyola.edu (a radical approach).

 

One could also explicitly preventing certain websites, like Facebook (this would be more effective during face-to-face session in the LLC).

Then there are the facilities within your textbook websites (Quia) and within your course management (Blackboard, keywords for free tools being: Course Statistics, Statistics Tracking with activity_accumulator, Performance Dashboard, Early Warning System Rules, Adaptive Release rules for content, project ASTRO which is an acronym for Advanced System Tracking and Reporting Online), or as an add-on (Provost Pulse).

With the impetus being on ubiquity these days, it will have to be seen whether there are tools for Blackboard or Quia that can help enforcing that students use specific computers (maybe via IP address of computer?).

Beyond these solutions, there is an entire research area for, and software market revolving around, student retention management which also covers attendance tracking. Notable players include Hobsons EMT® Retain and Starfish Early-alert (which is run by a former Blackboard VP and can be integrated with Blackboard student data system as a building block).

 

I suggest we invest our limited local resources into finding better ways to integrate and train on these existing central facilities that provide information on learning (which we then can use to refine our teaching). Given current circumstances, I would recommend exploring the tracking systems in Quia and Blackboard (not restricted to being used on the LLC computers) and tracking learning outcomes (like student language recordings which the LLC can help with – not as much with the digital recording technology which is being commoditized, but rather with providing a language learning shared/collaborative/meeintg space).

 

Categories: e-learning, Institution-is-Loyola-University-Maryland, Metrics Tags: , , , , , ,