Resources

Decorative ImageKey resources available to members of the CSU community include those offered by the Center for Analytics of Learning and Teaching (C-ALT), those offered through the Unizin Consortium, and those available through other universities and professional organizations.

Canvas Analytics

The learning analytics dashboard in the Canvas learning management system allows you to use analytics to support teaching, learning, and the design of future courses. You can learn more on the Canvas Analytics at https://canvas.colostate.edu/analytics/.

The Center for the Analytics of Learning and Teaching

The Center for the Analytics of Learning and Teaching (C-ALT) is a university research center housed in the College of Health and Human Sciences and the School of Education. It supports faculty-driven research projects that use academic analytics, learning analytics, and educational data mining (EDM) methods to investigate questions related to learning and teaching. You can visit C-ALT at https://alt.colostate.edu.

The Unizin Consortium

In 2014, eleven distinguished higher education institutions came together with several goals:

  • to regain some control over the digital learning ecosystem to encourage vendor development in directions that would be more beneficial to higher education,
  • to share the costs of development and operations in two areas of instruction: sharing learning objects and sophisticated learning analytics tools and platforms, and
  • to take advantage of consortial purchases for a much larger student population thus achieving significant economy of scale.

The result was the Unizin Consortium (https://unizin.org), which was launched by CSU, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Florida and which, for its first five years, also included the University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska, Ohio State University, Oregon State University, Penn State University, and the University of Wisconsin. As a result of joining Unizin, CSU transitioned from the BlackBoard LMS to Canvas. This has been a strongly positive experience for faculty and students at CSU, as Canvas is much easier to use, open in its architecture, and continuously upgraded.

The primary reason CSU joined Unizin was to advance our understanding and use of learning analytics data and tools at the level of individual student. Our desire was and continues to be engaging in using big data from learning management systems in combination with data from student information systems to produce learning analytics predictions for students within individual course sections.

A key benefit of our membership in Unizin has been the opportunity to work with some of the best institutions in the country to advance the state of the art in learning analytics and bring the benefits of using learning analytics to our students, faculty, and staff. A central element in our LA environment is the Unizin Data Platform (UDP), which holds both in-course data from Canvas and SIS data (in our case, from the Banner system) at the individual student level.

Recently, additional institutions have joined Unizin, and still more are interested in doing so as well. As more institutions join the consortium, its ability to develop and implement sophisticated learning analytics platforms, tools, and data repositories will continue to grow.

Resources from Other Universities and Professional Organizations

The following organizations and institutions provide useful information about learning analytics.

SoLAR: The Society for Learning Analytics Research). SoLAR provides numerous resources for LA researchers. Several are listed below.

Other Professional Organizations

 Governmental Resources

Institutional Resources

Other Resources