Collaboration to Advance Student Success: Building Partnerships Between Technology and Advising

In this session, we will provide an overview of Penn State’s Elevate project, a learning analytics prototype available to both faculty and academic advisers, which has been designed to analyze and provide real-time behavioral insight into student engagement data produced by our learning management system, Canvas. Elevate’s custom alert system and supporting activity graphs, are designed to draw the attention of a faculty member or academic adviser to students who are showing a sharp decline in engagement as compared to peers in the same course. Faculty members and/or academic advisers can then determine the appropriate outreach to a student to best support their learning and overall success. Particularly relevant over the last year is the ability to quickly identify students that might be struggling to engage course materials due to COVID-related challenges such as lack of appropriate technology, caring for a sick family member, or becoming sick themselves.

Speakers:
David R. Smith, Penn State, Associate Dean for Advising and Executive Director, Division of Undergraduate Studies.
Janet Schulenberg.
Drew Wham.
D. Benjamin Hellar, Penn State, Lead User Experience Engineer.