New OU Analyse Team Wins Top Prize for Educational Dataset
The OU Analyse team has been awarded the prestigious Educational Dataset Prize by
the Educational Data Mining Society for their
remarkable work with the OULAD dataset. The OULAD dataset, which
consists of anonymised student interactions with the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) at
The Open University, combined with demographics and study results, has had a major impact
on the field of learning analytics.
OU Analyse is a system powered by machine learning methods for early identification of students at risk of failing. All students with their risk of failure in their next assignment are updated weekly and made available to the course tutors and the Student Support Teams to consider appropriate support. The overall objective is to significantly improve the retention of OU students.
The two-day event was held at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Over 100 participants dove into our dataset and experimented with it. Interesting projects in the area of social comparison and visualisation have been developed.
The principal aim of Hack@LAK18 was to enable multi-disciplinary thinking over key open challenges in Learning Analytics based on a problem-oriented, pragmatic approach. OULAD was one of the recommended datasets by the organisers.
Tim Blackman, the Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, explains the importance of using The OUAnalyse (Early Alert Indicators) dashboard and how it can enhance ALs current practice to target interventions proactively to support students especially those who may be struggling (OU intranet).
OU Analyse, the OU’s Predictive Learning Analytics system, was selected as a finalist and among the four best projects for the 2020 edition of the UNESCO Prize in Education
September 2020 - winners of the DataIQ 2020 Awards in Best use of data by a not-for-profit organisation.
April 2020 - OUAnalyse awarded Recognition of Excellence in Teaching at the OU.
for Outstanding Impact on Teaching, Curriculum and Students.
5 September 2019 - OU Analyse was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Awards 2019 in the category Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year.
26 January 2016 - OU Analyse mentioned as the UK's only significant headway in Predictive Analytics
28 July 2015 - OU Analyse was featured on the BBC News website.
24 July 2015 - Predicting at-risk students at the Open University was part of the weekend article in The Financial Times.
30 July 2015 - Times Higher Education mentioned OU Analyse in their weekly overview in academia.