Latest updates from The Open University.
OU Analyse has won a 2025 OU Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET) Award for its work on the Student Facing Dashboard (SFD), demonstrating the valuable support that technology can provide for teaching and learning.
Machine learning techniques are applied to two types of data: student demographic data and dynamic data represented by their VLE activities. Records of previous presentations are used to build and validate predictive models, which are then applied to the data of the running presentation. VLE data is collected daily at a very fine grain level, representing individual actions and activity types according to the module study plan.
OU Analyse uses the module fingerprint, demographic data of current students and their VLE activities to build a number of predictive models that take into account different properties of input data. Their conclusions are combined to classify students and predict who is at risk. The list of students is supplemented with justifications to explain the prediction.
In Spring 2014 the project was piloted and evaluated on two introductory OU modules with about 1500 and 3000 students, respectively. In 2020, tutors from all undergraduate OU modules have access to the dashboard application and predictions are generated for more than 150,000 every year.
In addition to the identification of at risk students, we are testing a personalised Activity Recommender that would be available to students to advise them how to improve their performance in the course.
