As students progress through eLearning environments, they generate large amounts of data. These traces—the digital records of online activities, assignments, courses, and degree programs—paint a complex portrait of student behavior, from millisecond-level click patterns to semester enrollment records, at scale. In ways that had previously been unobservable, researchers can now begin to rigorously assess questions like: How are students studying? Are they engaging constructively with learning materials? How does this activity relate to course performance? How do these relationships change with different students and courses?
The eLearning Research and Practice Lab is a link between IU faculty researchers, IU administration, and the information technology systems that store eLearning records, helping to enable systematic and sustained research. The lab also supports an interdisciplinary discourse community on the constructive and responsible use of these data assets.
We are a lab within the Data to Insight (D2I) Center, in the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI). The lab is currently funded by Indiana University’s Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and by the Charting the Future Phase 2 grant from the Lilly Endowment.
Learn more about the lab