Week four in the summer term ends a day early with the midterm break Friday at the end of the fourth week. While the number of assignments, discussions, files, and media recordings increased, the number of students dropped slightly.
| Category | Week one | Week two | Week three | Week four |
| Active courses | 19 | 20 | 21 | 21 |
| Teachers | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Students | 212 | 250 | 277 | 269 |
| Assignments | 477 | 534 | 584 | 654 |
| Discussions | 66 | 78 | 101 | 110 |
| Files | 800 | 850 | 876 | 900 |
| Media recordings | 84 | 176 | 263 | 340 |
The number of students active in Canvas courses dropped by eight students. Canvas analytics cannot provide a definitive cause for the drop in the number of active students, but the most probable cause is withdrawal of students from courses either by faculty or the students.
Activity on the Canvas platform saw a Monday peak this week, which coincided with the first day of midterm examinations on the schedule. Thursday had not come to a close at the time this report was written, but activity appears to be tapering one day earlier this week, possibly due to the midterm break on Friday.
Week four provides the first look at meaningful grade distributions and the results for MS 150 Statistics were both surprising and concerning. At midterm the course has a deeply bimodal distribution that was not apparent from the submission rate data. In some slightly exaggerated sense, students are either succeeding fabulously or wiping out spectacularly. Summer term is, to borrow a cliched term, fast and furious. As an instructor my head is down in the trenches marking assignments, providing support to students, communicating, assisting, and building out course materials. Tests are set to mark themselves upon submission and other than checking post hoc for possible misconfigured questions, I do not have a keen awareness for whether some students are consistently performing better than others across multiple tests. The result is a lack of awareness of the bigger picture until I stop to have a look at something such as the grade distribution.
At this point the online statistics course is a moderately mature online course in its fourth term online, supported by
76 videos and an
online textbook which is also now available from within Canvas. The coursework and tests have been refined and adapted to online delivery over the past year. The support is there for students to succeed. My own impression from talking to students who have struggled in the class during the past year is that not all students have a learning style that adapts well to online education. For some students residential instruction is critical to their ability to succeed in college.
SC 130 Physical Science this summer has a grade distribution that is more reflective of grade distributions seen pre-pandemic. A few students tend to struggle with a science class that demands two to three laboratory reports per week in summer, reports that often include a mathematical analysis. The residential laboratories provide an opportunity for one-on-one direct support to students provided that they attend the laboratory sessions.
Across both courses 486 assignments of 672 total assignments made have been submitted. About one third of the assignments that have been made remain outstanding, but this is a moving target. Each day new assignments are due, and each student is working through the asynchronous material at their own rate. Thus there is actually a continuous flow of assignments being made and completed. Note that this pie chart is not the same set of numbers as is being tracked in the first table of this report. The first table is counting assignments in courses. The data depicted in the chart above is the assignments in a course times the number of students in the course, summed across all assignments to date.
This flow in submissions can be seen in the above chart. Some students are working a few days behind others, hence the rise in submissions from the far right side moving towards the left. The numbers are regular homework assignments. T refers to tests. ODX refers to open data explorations that are submitted as presentations, they are the more challenging assignments of the course.
In physical science the students are each at different places in their submissions of laboratory reports. There are still a couple of students who are not consistently getting work submitted. Both students have received and continue to receive support in submitting work.
Learning management system analytics primarily report page views, page views are the currency of the modern web site era. Instructors are more interested in student performance metrics. Canvas provides access to an instructor at the course level to a report that includes course performance and page views. Page views are a crude measurement of engagement and there is a loose connection to performance. In MS 150 Statistics the four students performing below 70% have less than 200 page views. All students above 450 pages views are above 90% in the course. With engagement comes success.
This also suggests that ensuring students have the appropriate technology and access to the Internet, including at home access, does play a role in student success. Increased ability to engage increases the probability of student success. This is an argument in support of quantity of access over quality of access. A student who has home access may be working on limited low quality bandwidth, but the ability to engage at any time outweighs the bandwidth advantage of access during limited working hours on high quality broadband on a college campus.
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