 Good afternoon. My name is Deirdre Rhine and I'm from Mary Immaculate College and my colleague Geraldine Brosnan wasn't able to be with us today so I'll just take the helm and it's always hard to follow Mark because they are kind of really ahead of the game I think and what they're doing. So I suppose first of all just to say that I work in the Center for Teaching and Learning in Mary Immaculate College and over the last two years I've been working particularly within the blended learning units so I guess once you do that when you're designing blended and online courses you get to see all this data coming in from through the VLE and then I started to think and my colleague David Maloney what could we do with this data and just finding out more about learning analytics really and so I'm hoping if I press it goes so I like this quote from Slade and Prince Lou and it's that is education is primarily a moral practice not a causal one and therefore learning analytics should function primarily as a moral practice resulting in understanding rather than measuring and we've been having those discussions at the table today how you know measurement the student experience actually how do you measure that because in some ways what we're talking about a lot today is about engagement rather than actual learning. So I suppose Dr. Keith Hampson will talk about three different types of analytics you have your institutional I suppose tracking the learners over the course of their time in college then you have the engagement which we have been doing a bit of really in Mary I and only touching the surface of and also then I suppose if you think of it where we're really wanting to get to is how we measure actual learning and I think that's where we're all going to you know benefit from from talking to each other and so in terms of Mary I then as I said we were really only kind of scratching the surface in terms of engagement but we we used Moodle at a very simple level with activity completion and with badges and what we did was for 200 first year psychology students we had them take three week slots where they had to watch videos do some activities and then at the end of the three weeks they would get a badge worth 5% of the course so in doing that then we were able to actually track who was actually engaging and also try to promote self-regulation with them so they had to get this work done within the three weeks to get the badge and so it allowed us to see those who were doing everything those who suddenly and I think you mentioned this this morning in the idea that maybe somebody stopped suddenly doing their work why is that happening and also it's gone down a little bit those who aren't engaging at all and so are they just gone have our systems not just told us or they just you know have partied all through the semester and so we need to know and that's where our retention and our looking after our students and finding out what's going on with them and it's only a simple system but it can help with that on a modular level we're doing it at the moment we'd like to go forward and use it I suppose at you know course levels as well and so then in terms of these are just a few graphs but the graph that's interesting is this one which was the badge completion so we're what we were after was self-regulation and getting them to complete the work maybe over the course of the three weeks rather than as you can see in the beginning 155 of them decided to wait till the last week and then they were going to do all the work and probably realistically they did in about two or three days that you know so over the time we were hoping to see more engagement over weeks one and two now we started to see it in the second section then we got to the third section there was a massive drop but what we call St. Patrick's week as opposed to St. Patrick's day happens so you get this idea of what's happening and then they started to engage more so we got a little bit more self-regulation they began to realize some of the students that if they did it earlier it was done and they didn't have to worry about it the other graphs are just to show that this was a two-week intensive module that some of our first-year students take for psychology the very peak at the beginning is the orientation session we would have given them it's very very important that they understand why are they on the VLE how do I use it properly otherwise the analytics really I suppose you don't you know it doesn't make sense to them so you can see that they worked kind of consistently the dip in the middle would have been the weekend they had to have the work in on Friday again you're promoting self-regulation and down here was just the regular 12-week module where they had MCQs and you can see they're very strategic and what they do is obviously the peaks are when the MCQ is on so that just gives you an idea of I suppose how you know we we have on a small level looked at engagement but what I'm really interested in is the learning analytics and I suppose this is a real exciting start to be here today and hopefully get to talk to people