Connecting Analytics and Curriculum Design: Process and Outcomes of Building a Tool to Browse Data Relevant to Course Designers

ABSTRACT: The disconnect between data collection and analysis across academic and administrative units within institutions of higher education makes it challenging to incorporate diverse data into curricular design. Understanding the factors related to student retention and success is unlikely to occur by focusing on only one unit at a time. By promoting course design informed by data from diverse units, we are more likely to understand important connections that could encourage more effective and holistic change. Facilitating evidence-based course design should begin with a faculty-driven process to identify how best to explore data across units for integration into the traditional course/curricular design. Our paper describes how data from institutional, learning, and what we call “developmental ” analytics can be incorporated into course and curricular design by using a purposefully built analysis tool that permits the exploration of data relevant to course/curriculum design. This Browser of Student and Course Objects (BoSCO) is being built in a faculty-driven process and can be used as a bridge between the analytics space and the course/curriculum design environments, therefore encouraging faculty to use analytics for course and curricular design