There has been a lot of buzz about student analytics, i.e. pulling student progress data out of  LMSs like Blackboard or Moodle.

Rio Salado College has gained a bit of attention with their PACE system. Monash university is looking at how to use Moodle to assess engagement and identify, and a risk students.

What is generally being proposed is some kind of dashboard.  Dashboards provide a way to present relevant information in a way that make immediate sense.

For those struggling with the concept, here’s a research focused analytics dashboard.

academia

“Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 1,745,076 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 1,512,828 papers and 527,736 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 3.9 million unique visitors a month.”

“Academia.edu’s Analytics Dashboard… allows an academic to understand in sophisticated detail how their research is being used by the academic community. It shows them countries that are sending them the most traffic, search engines and other sites that are sending them the most traffic, and overall profile views and document views.”