1. What is OnTask

Welcome to OnTask, the platform offering instructors and educational designers the capacity to use data to personalize the learner 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 larger the number of learners, the more difficult is for instructors to provide support. Typical solutions usually include suggesting or providing generic resources that are only relevant to a subset of the audience.

Learner testimonials

“its not the email itself, but what it represents: the accountability for your learning”

“I think it makes sense as a reflection of the whole semester, oh this is where I struggled with.”

In parallel with 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 personalized 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 personalized 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 personalize 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.

Instructor testimonials

“A number of the participants were highly complimentary of the OnTask software tool and several of the teaching staff […] are actively planning and preparing to use OnTask in the second semester of this academic year.”

“We were also very pleased to support the inclusion of OnTask into the Apereo Incubation process. We have been impressed by the thinking that informs OnTask and would like to see it thrive as an open source solution as we think it has great potential.”

The rest of the document is divided into 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 alearning experience, how to load data, manipulate the table and create the personalized actions. The audience for this part is teachers and designers that need to personalize the interactions they have with learners in a platform offering some data sources.

The third part contains a step by step tutorial on how to use OnTask from the instructor’s point of view.

The fourth part covers some more advanced functionalities such an application programming interface (API) that allows other platforms to upload data to OnTask.

1.1. Research

There are several platforms that implement similar functionality or follow a similar approach. OnTask has been implemented with numerous ideas initially present in the Student Relationship Engagement System SRES) and subsequent versions. The common idea among them is the positive impact that personalized communication may have when supporting learners. There are a few scientific publications that document the ideas and processes that inspired the creation of OnTask:

• Pardo, A., Bartimote-Aufflick, K., Buckingham Shum, S., Dawson, S., Gao, J., Gašević , D., … Vigentini, L. (2018). OnTask: Delivering Data-Informed Personalized Learning Support Actions. Journal of Learning Analytics, 5(3), 235-249.
• Pardo, A., Jovanović, J., Dawson, S., Gašević, D., & Mirriahi, N. (2018). Using Learning Analytics to Scale the Provision of Personalised Feedback. British Journal of Educational Technology. doi:10.1111/bjet.12592
• 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

1.2. License

The OnTask software is open source and available under the MIT License.