UW– Madison initiated this program in 2021, formerly known as the DEEP Microgrant Program, to help grow institutional capacity around using teaching and learning data for course and program improvement. It was created to encourage innovation, exploration and iteration in teaching and learning with a focus on taking action – to make incremental changes to a course design, teaching practice or course progression pathway.
Over the program years, we have supported a variety of impactful and important projects.
This year’s microgrant program focuses on a critical question: How does engagement with online course content impact student performance? For example, how are students engaging with content? What online materials do they interact with? How does student engagement affect assignment outcomes? What can we learn about how students prepare for assignments, or study for quizzes and exams?
Projects are structured using an action research framework; participants plan or take actions for course or program improvement based upon what they learn. (This is different from an educational research project that requires IRB review.) This is designed to be an iterative process that starts with a question and results in a course or program change, or a plan for action. Project awardees share back to campus about their project at a year-end campus event.
Quantitative and qualitative data
The types of data collected or analyzed have been a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, specifically chosen for each project. They have looked at enrollments, performance assessments, engagement in the classroom or LMS, student perceptions and reflections, third-party classroom observations, and peer feedback from group work.
Insights & Impacts
Each project provides more specifics about their action plan on their posters and in the presentation slides. Several broad categories of impacts are common across the portfolio of projects.
- Data-Informed Pedagogical/curriculum changes: instructors describe changes to their course/program materials or teaching strategies based on data insights.
- Expanded or ongoing use of data: some participants have specific plans to iterate on their use of data. For example, one instructor created a chatbot to answer student questions, based on course materials. Others are planning to continue data collection and analysis, after obtaining IRB approval.
- Increase impacts through ongoing communication: awardees are sharing about their project work across campus and also at other national and international conferences. Awardees have the opportunity to present at a global virtual conference sponsored by the Society for Learning Analytics Research ‘SoLAR’) and many past cohorts have taken advantage of this opportunity to connect with a larger learning analytics community.
Support for the i2i Program
The program builds on the foundation we’ve built and continues to develop our ability to use data from the teaching and learning environment to better serve our learners, instructors, educational professionals, and the institution.
The program is renewed annually. If you are interested in learning more about the next grant cycle, please email the program lead at ddrake@wisc.edu.
Awardees collaborate with peers in the program through regular cohort meetings, where they can learn from each other and connect with individuals in other units across campus. Participants are also invited to participate in optional sessions about data empowered educational practices/learning analytics through the UW–Madison Learning Analytics Community of Practice.
The awardees work closely with the teaching and learning and student record data stewards, to support and align data goals with campus policy. This work has helped to improve our processes and communication about data governance. A high-level overview document of the data governance process was created to provide some background and an overview about data governance, and to make sure project participants are aware of the steps involved. Each project completes a data inventory which is the basis for conversations with data stewards.