I'm not teaching right now, but much of my attention and focus as an administrator is on improving student success, retention, and graduation. Also, as you also know, to these ends the college is in the middle of implementing a new advising model. I'm thinking that these endeavors could possibly be supported by an analysis of our student ePortfolios. For example, we have a huge corpus of student writing in these portfolios related to their academic and career goals. Would this information be useful to an advisor? to a program director?
We also have been attempting, over the past few years, to come up with metrics to "predict" the likelihood of a student completing a degree vs. dropping out - but without much success. Is it possible that looking at /analyzing students' reflections/writings in their first semester's ePortfolio could give us an indication which students might be at more risk?"
I would have to use a textual analysis tool, but am not sure yet if that would be sufficient. Suppose, for example, Wordle or Voyeur indicated that the word "career" was prominent in the reflections/writings of first year students - so I would know that the topic of careers is on their minds. But how would I know what the appearance of that word meant? Does it mean they didn't know what career they wanted, or that having a career (getting a good job) was their primary goal, or what? So it seems the tool would point me in a direction, but another level of analysis would be needed.
As co-chair of the Humanities Advising Council, I find your ideas compelling. As we develop the New to College seminars for each of our departments/divisions, and as we implement ePortfolios as activities in these classes, I suspect it could be very useful to do a textual analysis not only to identify issues (or words) that occur frequently, but to examine the clusters of words that appear to better understand what students are thinking about, writing about, and (possibly) struggling with. (No comments about ending that sentence with a preposition, btw.) I think this would only be useful, however, if all the New to College seminars actually incorporated or implemented student ePortfolios in the same manner. That is, the seminars would need to explore common themes regardless of the department or division in which the seminar occurs to ensure that the results generate similar (or, at least, related) information. I think the more ideas we can come up with, the more tools we can employ to help students, engage students, and identify at-risk students, the more effective we will be as advisors and as a college community. I would be interested in discussing (or investigating) this more closely with you (I have applied for the New to College CTL seminar; I was accepted for the fall, but Humanities chose not to proceed with it at that time).
ReplyDeleteHow easy is it to export the eportfolio data? Does it just export as an excel page automatically or will you need a custom application to do the work?
ReplyDeleteI agree with your résume. Wordle/voyeur summary representation of student ePortfolio would be akin to Rorschach inkblot - a great conversention opener for a dialogue between a student and an adviser. I wonder what information a Wordle of a faculty annual evaluation would convey ;.
ReplyDeleteThere are several very promising ideas for a project here -- I will be responding with e-mail with some specifics soon enough. Provided we can get the underlying data for a modest set of student ePortfolios, there are many opportunities to visualize and analyze these 'digital artifacts' and learn more about our students!
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