Dive Brief:
- Unizin, an 11-member consortium of public universities, will work with the IMS Global Learning Consortium to promote its newly created Caliper Analytics Standard.
- Campus Technology reports that one of the first applications to use Caliper will be Unizin’s Engage e-text reader and digital content platform, giving members access to data about the life cycle of teaching and learning content in the platform.
- Unizin will help IMS Global develop a Simple Content Use Metric Profile to define the way data is shared through Caliper, which Unizin members will use and provide feedback on for improvement.
Dive Insight:
Right now, most institutions use a variety of add-ons to their learning management systems to provide additional functionality for students and faculty. But cloud-based, third-party tools often prevent people within the college or university from seeing the data generated by students who use them. While a faculty member can track how long a student reads an assignment in the LMS, once she leaves the system for a third-party tool, every click she makes is hidden.
Even if institutions can get that data back, it is often in a different format from the data analysts would want to merge it with. Caliper aims to solve these problems: defining learning events that should be tracked and standardizing how to do so. Importantly, it will also create a roadmap to help institutions retain control of their students’ data from the beginning.