The OnTask Project aims to improve the academic experience of students through the delivery of timely, personalised and actionable student feedback throughout their participation in a course.

The two-year project started in 2016 and was funded through a Strategic Priority Commissioned Grant by the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) of the Australian Government, and addresses the challenges faced by Australian Higher institutions to improve the quality of the student experience within the context of increasing enrolment numbers over the past years. The project is led by The University of Sydney (USYD) in collaboration with University of Technology Sydney (UTS), University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia), University of South Australia (UniSA), University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Edinburgh.

As part of its deliverables, the OnTask project developed a software tool that gathers and assesses data about student’s activities throughout the semester and allows instructors to design personalised feedback with suggestions about their learning strategies. By providing frequent suggestions about specific tasks in the course, students are able to quickly adjust their learning progressively.

The tool is LMS agnostic and receives its data from various sources such as video engagement, assessments, student information systems, electronic textbooks, discussion forums, etc. Instructors and educational designers can use the platform to connect large data sets about students with concrete and frequent actions to support their learning.

Examples of feedback OnTask could facilitate includes directing them to specific chapters or worked examples in their textbook, suggesting additional reading or resources, enrolling them in required workshops or laboratory tutorials, suggesting the most effective study techniques for the tasks in the course, directing them to university support services, etc. OnTask aims to assist instructors to support all students in a course regardless of their performance by providing relevant, personalised suggestions.

The tool is also designed to provide evidence to management bodies about student support actions and their impact on the overall learning experience. Its open and modular architecture is conceived to foster a shift at the institutional level on how to improve the quality of the learning experience.

Retrieved from: https://www.ontasklearning.org/

What might you change about your course content or your teaching if you knew which courses your students had already completed, and with what success? Or if you knew how many were likely to opt for a major in your discipline? Knowing your audience is key to starting off a course at the right level with the right tone. A ‘Know thy students’ project would deliver, before the start of the term, an aggregated report of students’ prior courses, grades, and engagement levels. Already partly underway in Arts, this project builds on a published use case by Motz and colleagues. Studies suggest good potential to help instructors tailor teaching, curriculum and expectations based on greater understanding of their likely class areas of specialization, past course history, likely study path, demographics, etc.

Instructors in large online or blended courses need tools that can help them monitor student online activity and performance, so they can provide support and intervention as needed. Ginda and colleagues from Indiana University have proposed an activity dashboard design that significantly improves upon the native Canvas dashboard.
It allows instructors to monitor student activity and performance in courses with multiple sections and large enrollment through an interactive, multilevel heat map. The top level shows an aggregated view with weekly activity (based on participation in discussions, page views, and quiz attempts) and submission grades for all course sections. Selecting a specific cell drills down the engagement or grade date for individual students in a lower-level heat map. A preliminary user study showed that instructors found the dashboard an improvement upon existing embedded dashboard in Canvas