OnTask

The OnTask Project (Scaling the Provision of Personalized Learning Support Actions to Large Student Cohort)  

The Strategic Priority Commissioned Grant by the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) of the Australian Government  funded the Scaling the Provision of Personalized Learning Support Actions to Large Student Cohorts research proposal that facilitated the creation of the OnTask Project which aims to improve the academic experience of students through the delivery of timely, personalized and actionable student feedback throughout their participation in a course.The two-year project, started in 2016, addresses the challenges faced by Australian Higher institutions to improve the quality of the student experience within the context of increasing enrollment numbers over the past years. The project is led by The University of Sydney in collaboration with University of Technology Sydney (UTS), University of New South Wales (UNSW), University of South Australia (UNISA), the University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Edinburgh.

As part of its deliverables, the OnTask project is developing a software tool that gathers and assesses data about student’s activities throughout the semester and allows instructors to design personalized feedback with suggestions about their learning strategies. By providing frequent suggestions about specific tasks in the course, students will be able to quickly adjust their learning progressively. The tool is LMS agnostic and receives its data from various sources such as video engagement, assessments, student information systems, electronic textbooks, discussion forums, etc. Instructors and educational designers can use the platform to connect large data sets about students with concrete and frequent actions to support their learning.The tool is also designed to provide evidence to management bodies about student support actions and their impact on the overall learning experience. It’s open and modular architecture is conceived to foster a shift at the institutional level on how to improve the quality of the learning experience. OnTask will be piloting 4 courses at USYD, UTS, and UNSW in early 2017.

Project Publications:

• • Kyle A. O’Connell, Elijah Wostl, Matt Crosslin, T. Lisa Berry, and James P. Grover (2019). Student Ability Best Predicts Final Grade in a College Algebra Course. Journal of Learning Analytics.