News Story

OUAnalyse awarded Recognition of Excellence in Teaching

Thursday 30 Apr 2020

RET is a scheme at The Open University created to celebrate outstanding contributions to learning, teaching and the student experience in all types of roles across the University – both individual and team roles. More than 470 student submissions were sent this year. OUAnalyse and the Early Alert Indicators project was recognised as winners of the OU Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET) in the category Excellence in enhancing teaching and learning.

OUAnalyse is a joint collaborative project between the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Data and Student Analytics (DSA). Conceived in 2013, this learning analytics tool uses Machine Learning models to predict every week which students are at risk of failing their assignments and need additional support. OUAnalyse is deployed in all undergraduate OU modules and primarily support tutors in monitoring their students and help them succeed in their studies.

Dr. Martin Hlosta, the leader of the KMi team commented on the success: "We are extremely grateful to be recognised by the OU for enhancing teaching and learning. Moreover, this would not be possible to achieve without our excellent tutors at the OU, their usage of the tool and supporting the students. To celebrate this mutual success of both the team and the tutors, the award will be collected by Anna Gillespie, our tutor champion from WELS faculty. Anna has been using the system from the very beginning and apart from using the tool she helped us with the training of hundreds of other tutors."

Team members: Martin Hlosta, Christotea Herodotou, Avinash Boroowa, Vaclav Bayer, Miriam Fernandez, Zdenek Zdrahal, John Domingue