Identify some of the educational challenges in the environment that you are considering. They may include those identified earlier.

Formulate two or three recommendations that set out how data gathered in this environment could be used better to support learners or educators.

Educational Challenges

Recording engagement.

One of the main challenges facing our staff in the current circumstances is to record student engagement. As noted in Kirkpatrick (2020), our metrics to fulfil student funding requirements were changed from attendance to engagement this session. This is a difficult matter to record even when students attend the College in person. It is arguably more difficult when students are only participating in the online space.

A student’s presence on the VLE on on Microsoft Teams, even if they appear to be doing a lot of clicking around is not evidence that they are engaged in the course material. Our courses do not make a great deal of use of forums (like this OU course does).

Some students, particularly in practical subjects and creative industries have College WordPress sites to record their development which helps in some way to prove their engagement. Perhaps an ePortfolio/diary approach for every student could be a central method of finding out how they are doing (either through imagery or short texts). This could be done on any of the available platforms (Moodle / Teams / WordPress).

Travel Arrangements

Before Covid 19 our students often travel a long way to get to the physical campus buildings. Perhaps we could make better use of geospatial data, bus timetables and course module timetabling to minimise the amount of travelling students have to do, perhaps by compressing their physical presence into fewer days whilst presenting all of their remote lectures on other days.

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Kirkpatrick, S (2020) Attendance, Available at: http://www.sfc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Funding_Student_Support_Seminar/SFC_Seminar_2018_-_Attendance.pdf (Accessed: 1st July 2020).