Summer session 2021 week seven analytics

Systemwide metrics

Week seven brought closure to the regular summer term. A few courses for new freshman which started a couple weeks behind the regular summer term remain in session. Of note this week was the appearance for the first time of course learning outcomes from the institutional bank of course learning outcomes in Canvas from courses other than my own MS 150 Statistics and SC 130 Physical Science courses.

The above dashboard was explored in a video. Another video explains how to add these institutionally stored course learning outcomes to any college course in Canvas. This dashboard, along with others that have been produced, remain proof of concept explorations. The design and the metrics reported can be specified by the college. The data powering the dashboard is actual data from those courses.

Trends by category in Canvas remained consistent with the trends seen over the past four weeks. 

The surprise this week was a spike in page views on Monday. Monday of week seven saw 16,423 page views, 4.5 standard deviations above the daily mean. There is no obvious explanation for this spike as the values on the day before and the days after do not show unusual values. Thursday saw the second highest number of page views. Thursday has had the highest number of page views in five of the seven weeks. Thursday of week seven also marked the start of final examinations, but even that does not explain an isolated Monday spike. 

The Monday spike pushed up the average number of page views per weekday for Monday. Prior to the Monday spike, Thursday had the highest average page views of any day of the week. 

Despite the massive surge on Monday, week seven has only a slightly elevated number of total page views by week. As a proxy for engagement, week seven performed on par with previous weeks. 

MS 150 Statistics and SC 130 Physical Science

The above chart are the final grade distributions for MS 150 Statistics and SC 130 Physical Science. The bimodal distribution in MS 150 is the deepest and most pronounced schism in 21 years of MS 150 Statistics. There were no students between 70% and 80%, and only two students between 80% and 90%. 14 students passed with an A or B. Three students passed with a D. Eight failed the course. Of those 12  students above 90%, five were above 97%. Students either succeeded spectacularly in this pure online course, or wiped out almost completely.

The data does not provide insight into the cause of the bimodal distribution. There are hints however provided by the SC 130 Physical Science distribution, which is essentially a strongly skewed distribution. All of the students in SC 130 Physical Science at term end passed the class. The class was a blended online and residential course. Each week I was able to assist students in ways that are more challenging to accomplish online. "No, don't tap your phone screen there, tap here..." Bear in mind that many students are working from mobile phone interfaces, not necessarily laptops. That said, every student having a laptop would not necessarily resolve the bimodal split. My own personal sense is that some students excel in an online, asynchronous course. Maybe the successful students are more organized, perhaps more able to self-monitor their learning, more self-disciplined, perhaps enjoying more support from the family to get work done. 

If the bimodal distribution in the pure online course represents a population of students who excel in an online course and a population of students who need a residential experience, then this would provide strong support for retaining both modes going forward where appropriate to a given course.