Academic Reporting Tools 2.0 (ART 2.0), a suite of data visualization services that render U-M course and academic program data in order to help students, faculty, and administration make informed decisions, has released a first service to campus called CourseProfile. The tool was developed by a team within the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG), part of the Office of Digital Education & Innovation (DEI), led by Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics and Astronomy August Evrard.
ART 2.0 aims to provide robust data on courses and programs from past academic terms in a user-friendly format to further enable personalized and engaged learning on campus. By increasing the amount of information available for students and faculty alike, ART 2.0 is fostering a community that leverages data for better decision making and opportunities at U-M, promotes transparency and serves as a driving force for innovation. Additionally, the tool harnesses data to improve understanding of how learning procedures and teaching practices affect learning while providing more insights into courses, academic programs and student learning at U-M. Currently, data is available for nearly 9,000 courses across U-M.
ART 2.0 is an updated and extended version of a service tool originally developed in 2006 by the LSA Information Technology Advisory Committee. That service focused on data surrounding course enrollment, grade correlations among courses, the impact of standardized test scores on course performance, and other curricular features. In 2014, ART 1.0 was selected as a program to be scaled up through DIG in order to enhance its impact and usefulness as a tool for faculty, staff and students.
The Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) consists of a team of software developers, user experience designers, behavioral scientists and multi-disciplinary student fellows that works directly with user communities within U-M in order to provide resources for homegrown educational software innovations on campus and scale up these digital enterprises to maturity through collaboration across U-M’s digital ecosystem.
DEI aims to redefine public residential education at a 21st century research university through the creative use of technology and targeted experimentation with digital programs in order to enable engaged, personalized and lifelong learning for the entire Michigan community and learners around the world. DEI houses three labs, the Digital Innovation Greenhouse, the Digital Education & Innovation Lab and the Learning, Education, & Design Lab, within its infrastructure. To date, U-M has reached more than 4 million lifelong learners through MOOCs developed by faculty in partnership with DEI and continues to be a pioneer in digital learning and learning analytics.
The ART 2.0 CourseProfile service is available to the U-M campus community at Academic Reporting Tools 2.0