Easy to use
Easy to interpret
Online Activity Analysis (OAAT) tool project aims to empower teachers to analyse data from their institutional learning management system to improve their teaching and assist students to be successful in their studies.
OAAT is not just a static usage report. In fact, it has many good feastures:
Teachers do not need to install any software or set up any servers.
Excel (Excel 2010 or latest) and Windows 10.1 are needed
OAAT can be used at any time you like during the semester
Teachers can specify the period to analyse the data
Teachers can get up-to-date usage information
Teachers can download individual student usage dataset for further exploration or performing analysis in other applications
OAAT provides interactive reports and interpretation insights.
We have developed the OAAT with teachers to ensure it supports real and practical teaching practice.
Through the development of OAAT, teachers are interviewed about their online teaching practices, course design, how they make use of data in their teaching and what other data or analysis helps review or enhance their teaching. Teachers’ pedagogies and their opinion are used for enhancing OAAT
Teachers can use OAAT to undertand students online behaviours, take action to help students and improve their learning experience.
Understand how the LMS is being used by students and evaluate teaching materials
Understand students’ learning progress and take actions
Do simple learning analytics
Enhance learning and teaching
Get individual student data for further analysis or research purposes
Just three simple steps to use OAAT
Download OAAT (For 32bit or 62bit Excel).
Archive the Blackboard course you want to analyse. But be aware of the 180 day restriction - see the User Manual for further details.
Open OAAT and import archived Blackboard course. Read the user guide for details.
The current version of OAAT can generate reports that the LMS does not provide. More reports and analyses will be developed in the future.
Overview of course usage
Usage of course features and materials by students
Correlation between marks and students’ usage
Prediction of student achievement from students’ usage
Extraction and analysis of student assessment data
Summary of students’ participation in discussion forum
Ability to export discussion forum by students
The Overview worksheet shows the summary of course usage.
Teachers can specify the period that they are interested in looking at.
This worksheet shows clicks on course features and materials for individual students within the specified period.
Teachers can make use of filters, or copy and paste the data to another file, for further exploration.
A summary of individual student participation in each forum is shown, including number of views, number of posts and word count for posts.
This function can export all the posts, including time, content, author and other information, to an Excel file for further exploration (e.g., social network analysis)
The correlation between marks in the GradeCenter and student usage within the Bb course is shown in this worksheet. This can help teachers to understand what pairs of variables are related and how strong the relationship is.
Teachers can do prediction to find out what factors (variables about LMS usage or marks recorded in the GradeCenter) affecting student achievement
Teachers can do prediction to find out what factors (variables about LMS usage or marks recorded in the GradeCenter) affecting student achievement
"Useful, interactive; much better than Bb course report in terms of the efficiency of generating report. Able to check hypothesis about online teaching strategies"
"Convenient, easy to use; better than Bb course report. Get data at any time and combine with student survey to understand student learning "
"Useful for grading students. Able to carry out Social Network Analysis using the dataset generated by OAAT "
You can download the tool and try it on your Blackboard course. The user guide and the Powerpoint can assist you to understand how to begin to use the tool. The sample data allows you to play around with OAAT. You can download OAAT based on your version of Microsoft Excel.
How to check my Excel bit version?
The only requirement for running OAAT is that you need to have an MS Windows(R) operating system with MS Excel(R)
Ms Ada Tse:
ada.sk.tse@polyu.edu.hk
Mr Sang Chan:
chun.sang.chan@polyu.edu.hk
Dr Christine Armatas:
christine.armatas@polyu.edu.hk
Educational Development Centre
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Hong Kong
