EDUCATING ANALYSTS

After an exhaustive 1/2 hour search (hey, everything happens at greater speeds nowadays, right?) for the uses of web analytics in education, I came across a gem of a starting point. The title: Using Log File Analysis to Evaluate Instructional Design — A PowerPoint presentation used in Ken Fanser and Rod Riegle's presentation at the 2003 Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning.


This resource hits a lot of really great ideas about using Web Analytics as a valuable tool for evaluation. It's dated but at the same time still very applicable. Some points I found interesting to consider after reviewing this presentation:

• One of the biggest barriers to entry for someone wanting to use a "log file" to evaluate their online instruction was getting the data in a readable format. No more. Tools like Google Analytics completely eliminate a lot of these painful and complicated steps of getting set up to see who's looking at your content.
  
  
• Some of the proposed limits to web analytics for use in education are still valid, while others I don't believe to be such a problem. Por exemplo, it still can be easy to misinterpret results from analytics tools, most of which are geared towards business goals rather than educational goals. Yet, the amount of data you can get from one user is not quite as limited as the presentation suggests, as well as some of the issues raised with rich media (Flash) aren't quite as valid. There are plenty of ways to work around/with rich media to cater to your analytics.
  
  
• The presentation raises some very important questions as to the effectiveness of analytics in online education.
  
  
• A fundamental question, quite possibly one of the only questions that needs to be asked in evaluation, is "Did learning occur?" How can that be determined from page views? Maybe with deeper analysis, we can approach a way to guess. Yet, isn't that a struggle of any educational medium, to assert whether or not learning did, in fact, occur?
  
  
• Another question that may be difficult to answer with web analytics: Was the content engaging?
  
  
• A more elementary question: How do I link student X to user X? Is it possible to evaluate effectiveness of instruction with web analytics at the single user level?

All in all, a great find for the subject. I wish I could get access to the recorded presentation.