The education sector has seen a lot of reformation in recent years. It is not unusual since it is one field where progressive values are incorporated and included without much doubt or hesitation. The education sector survived the pandemic and all the various turbulences it presented for this very reason. It is one area where change is welcomed and technological integration is crucial in welcoming these changes as well. One such instrument that is being very widely researched and incorporated into education these days is “Learning Analytics”.
Let us understand what Learning Analytics is and how Class Saathi incorporates it into its system.
Learning analytics is a mechanism that collects vital data to assess key areas of learning and reports on it to drive impactful reformations. The logical framework that governs learning analytics is nothing new. It has been around for decades. So now why is it gaining so much novel attention? The answer is simple, learning analytics makes use of artificial intelligence that uses data smartly in order to not just report findings but also suggest measures that can accurately predict future outcomes based on these numbers. This hastens the process of data collection, interpretation and analysis and also gives educators tangible outcomes to work on so that change can be driven in the most efficient and minutest ways.
This takes us to the next part of this article — what are the learning analytic tools that Class Saathi incorporates into its system?
Class Saathi prides itself on being an app that gives personalised learning recommendations for every student that uses this app. This may sound like a tall claim but it is one that is rightly justified by the system that our developers in South Korea have worked so hard to build. For the purpose of this report, we spoke to the people who creatively built this system and this is what they had to say:
Personalised learning is at the heart of Class Saathi’s operations and we built an app that benefits every student who uses it. For this purpose, our developers built a system with three main components:
A. Knowledge Level
Every response is recorded and analysed by a system based on areas such as difficulty level and skills. The app first records the comfortable learning level of the student and gives them questions based on the recorded level and pushes them to gradually move up.
B. Updated Difficulty Level
The difficulty level for each skill or question is assigned based on the number of students who get it right in the first attempt. If there are more students who get one question or skill right, then the question is deemed easy and difficult if it is vice versa. This keeps changing with improved student learning outcomes.
C. Solve Interval Data
This is the most revolutionary data tool that we use. What this does is record questions that a student gets wrong consistently and recommend quizzes to help them learn the concepts attached to these questions. The system does this for a while and then gives the student the same question to see if they have learnt the concept and moved up the levels of difficulty. This prepares students to reach higher order levels or learning without making it a difficult process.
As you can see, the logical framework that governs the app uses very complicated metrics and building that can only have been the product of genius minds. It is no easy task to standardise a product for students with globally varying learning levels.
Having said all of this, we must also remember that learning analytics can not be 100% accurate because it is constantly evolving. It can however predict the most probable outcomes for maximum benefit and maximum reformation.
In the words of our developers, it is a great difficulty to match reality to the learning level that is recorded by the system because accurate reading can be interrupted by many variables. However, the idea is to perfect a system by recognising the gaps, much as we do for our students. The important thing is to keep striving for perfection so that these gaps will be completely eliminated from our system and we have outcomes that don’t get in the way of achieving a higher understanding of student behaviour and learning.
