The Division of IT (DoIT) administers a number of IT systems and services to support the UMBC’s Teaching and Learning mission. These include Blackboard, Panopto, Poll Everywhere, VoiceThread, Vital Source e-Textbooks, and a number of course or system based learning tools. In addition, many courses use collaboration tools from Microsoft or Google for course assignments (see Collaboration Tools link) or the UMBC General Lab (GL) Unix environment for programming courses.
What Teaching & Learning data do we collect?
User Information
Your name, picture or avatar, email address, campus-id, and other contact information.
Course Information
Courses you register for, including instructor, course title, meeting times, course type, grades, rubrics or micro-credentials awarded.
Student Course submissions & tests
This includes course polls, online tests and quizzes, discussion posts, assignment submissions, chat messages, computer programs, electronically submitted papers and electronic homework.
Student use of of the learning tools (Learning Analytics)
We track what links you click on, the time you did this, how long you took, and what functions you did in that activity.
Logging Information
We track when you login and logout of services and when specific services are accessed that don’t require an individual login, but are authenticated via our single sign-on (SSO) or through the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) protocol. This logging information includes the time of day and the device information (IP address, OS type, Browser, and MAC address) of the device you are using.
How Do We Use Your Teaching & Learning Data
Teaching and Learning Activities
The data we collect is designed to support instructors’ pedagogical approach to student learning in the class and give students online insight into their learning and how well they are performing.
Tools & Reports
We provide interfaces and reports for instructors to see rosters, work submissions, grade books, chat messages, and other content generated by students in their course. We allow students to see their work submissions, grades, and other course content provided to students.
Learning Analytics
Learning analytics is designed to give instructors data on student activity that can be used to inform course pedagogy and effective interventions to improve student learning and course outcomes. Likewise, through the Check-My-Activity feedback tool, we provide students with data that allows them to understand how their activity and subsequent grade compares to the activity of an anonymous summary of course peers.
The goals of collecting learning analytics data are the following;
- Improve student outcomes
- Engage in earlier and more effective interventions
- Provide for more tailored mentoring and advising
- Support growth in student development
- Enable faculty research in effective pedagogy
In all cases, we aim to answer a key learning analytics question: What is an institution’s ethical obligation to act on what it knows about students? For more information, see “Ethical Learning Analytics: ‘Do No Harm’ vs. ‘Do Nothing’” at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1254657.
Service and Support
Ensure that the systems operate correctly, securely, and with adequate performance to provide a positive user experience. As such, when users experience support issues we have logging data to understand the cause.
The use of teaching and learning data for the purposes outlined above is safeguarded through several mechanisms, including our UMBC IT policies, the UMBC Institutional Review Board (IRB), and the UMBC Data Management Committee. Furthermore, the university has developed a set of Guiding Principles on the use of Student Data (available at the bottom of every myUMBC page) that emphasize respect, transparency, accountability, and empowerment in regards to the use of learning data.
How Do We Collect This Data?
Directly
The Teaching & Learning environments collects user and device login data, interactions with web links you click, contents or selections you have made in answering homework, quizzes, or exams.
Automatically
Clicks and interactions events are recorded with timestamps and device and user information to understand how students interact with the course.
From other university sources
Our learning environment receives user and course data from our PeopleSoft SA system, our UMBC Retriever Identify Management System, and our LDAP system.
How Do We Share Teaching & Learning Data
UMBC does not sell or rent your academic data. We do share some user information with the service providers that are part of our teaching and learning infrastructure. When we do share information with 3rd parties we require contractual language that forbids them from sharing your data without our consent and controls how they use and protect your data.