Analytics in Education is something that, for the first time in several years, did not appear on NMC Horizon’s report of future trends in education. This isn’t because people are no longer recognizing the importance of educational analytics, but instead is because the current generation of analysis tools have matured and been widely adopted. It’s no longer sufficient to just capture and analyze basic student data.
Emotuit (www.emotuit.com) has expressed its committed to pushing the field forward and has created a “next generation” tool for educational analytics. More specifically, in addition to standard approaches, the emotuit system also measures students’ emotional states across time.
Online learning is continuing to grow, and although we are starting to see more course creation and content standards, there is still a large disparity in the quality of online learning material. In addition, given that we know that students vary widely in their background skills and learning strategies, we see a dangerous gap forming between our students and the content being put out there.
One of Emotuit’s main goals is to provide teachers and educational institutions with the tools they need to able to understand each student as an individual. For instance, as students are learning, the emotuit system identifies students’ emotional states, allowing the system to calculate and report on what content is most effective for each student.
To help them accomplish this goal they recently hired Dr. Roger Taylor as their new Vice President of Research and Development. He spent over 10 years in academia studying emotion in learning. When asked about the role of emotion in education he said, “this is the most important topic in the field of education today. Understanding and adapting instruction is particularly critical in the area of e-learning where students are “one click away” from terminating a lesson. His presence will strengthen their expertise in this area and allow emotuit to continue their development of the next generation of educational analytics.
The company has been expanding rapidly and has already established partnerships with universities in the United States, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Ross Jones, emotuit’s CEO, said that, “our biggest challenge right now is managing our growth. The upside has been that there is a very keen interest in the next generation of education analytics, which is what we do.”
Emotuit’s engagement analytics is available currently as an app for Instructure’s Canvas learning management system and a building block for Blackboard Learn and you can contact them at info@emotuit.com to arrange a demonstration.
