Monday 21 May 2018

Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Analytics in the School of Medicine

Theme: Sharing experiences of using technology to enhance your practice

Author: Adrian Molyneux

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Medicine

Abstract: Traditionally, despite the high cost of summative medical examinations, opportunities for capturing useful in-depth performance data for all students have been limited, often resulting in a simple pass/fail result. Investigations in the School of Medicine demonstrated the wealth of data available that could be utilised for individual students to target and improve their weaker areas.

Summary of work: A bespoke analytics system was designed and developed from the ground up. This comprises (1) a feedback website giving students the means to view and listen in multiple different ways to all the feedback captured and compare themselves to the cohort average; (2) the server and database infrastructure to provide the necessary storage and statistical analysis; and (3) auditing tools to quantify the usage of the site by students.

Summary of results: Audit reports demonstrated that students made very heavy usage of the feedback website immediately following the release of results. Most made between 50 and 100 separate page “hits” within the first 24 hours. Separately, tutors report their satisfaction with the new streamlined electronic marking processes and their preference over the previous paper implementation.

Conclusions: A huge amount of data is available for capture during the various examinations that is of benefit to students in targeting areas for improvement. A technological approach facilitates this data capture and presentation.

Take-home message: With some initial investment in time and resources, summative exams may be extended to provide extremely valuable individualised and timely formative feedback for students.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.