What is OnTask¶
Welcome to OnTask, the platform offering instructors and educational designers the capacity to use data to personalise the learners experience.
Learning is complex, highly situated, and requires interacting with peers, instructors, resources, platforms, etc. This complexity can be alleviated providing learners with the right support actions. But this process becomes increasingly complex when the number of learners grows. The more learners, the more difficult is for instructors to provide support and usual solutions usually include generic resources that are only relevant to a subset of the audience.
In parallel wih this increase in complexity, learning platforms now generate a wealth of data when activities are mediated by technology. This data can be collected and used to help instructors and designers provide a truly personalised experience. Why is this not happening in current platforms? Because the connection between this data and learner support actions is challenging to implement. This is the focus of OnTask: provide instructors and designers with a platform to connect data emerging from learning environments with highly personalised student support actions.
OnTask is a web application that allows instructors and designers to combine data previously captured and stored in a table with a set of rules to personalise the content of a web document. That document can then be sent as an email or made available to each learner. The following picture shows the high level structure of the platform.
The rest of the document is divided into three blocks. The first block covers the technical details to download, install and configure the tool. It requires technological expertise and access to the adequate computing facilities (a virtual machine, a server, or similar). The main audience of this part is system administrators and advanced users that want to use the tool within their institution or for their own use.
The second part explains how to use OnTask in the context of a learning experience, how to load data, manipulate the table and create the personalised actions. The audience for this part is teachers and designers that need to personalise the interactions they have with learners in a platform offering some data sources.
The third part covers some more advanced functionalities such an application programming interface (API) that allows other platforms to upload data to OnTask.
Research¶
There are several platforms that implement similar functionality or follow a similar approach (see for example SRES. The common thread among them is the positive impact that personalised communication may have when supporting learners. There are a few scientific publications that document the ideas and processes that inspired the creation of OnTask:
- Liu, D. Y.-T., Taylor, C. E., Bridgeman, A. J., Bartimote-Aufflick, K., & Pardo, A. (2016). Empowering instructors through customizable collection and analyses of actionable information Workshop on Learning Analytics for Curriculum and Program Quality Improvement (pp. 3). Edinburgh, UK.
- Liu, D. Y. T., Bartimote-Aufflick, K., Pardo, A., & Bridgeman, A. J. (2017). Data-driven Personalization of Student Learning Support in Higher Education. In A. Peña-Ayala (Ed.), Learning analytics: Fundaments, applications, and trends: A view of the current state of the art: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52977-6_5
- Pardo, A., Jovanović, J., Dawson, S., Gašević, D., & Mirriahi, N. (In press). Using Learning Analytics to Scale the Provision of Personalised Feedback. British Journal of Educational Technology. doi:10.1111/bjet.12592
License¶
The OnTask software is open source and available under the MIT License.