Unizin & Canvas Data
As part of our commitment to enhancing educational outcomes and fostering an environment of continuous improvement, UCI has joined forces with the non-profit Unizin consortium, alongside 13 other distinguished R1 public universities. Launched in September 2023, this strategic partnership leverages the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) to bring to life an array of innovative dashboards and applications designed to support our faculty, staff, and researchers. By intertwining student and learning data through a sophisticated series of Context and Event stores, the UDP acts as the backbone for tools like ScoreShare, Spark, and the LTI Usage Dashboard. Our mission is clear: to equip instructors with secure, insightful access to learning data for their classes, thereby paving the way for enriched educational experiences across campus.
Learn more about Unizin or read the UCI press release about the Unizin partnership.
From a macro perspective, we now have access to the largest pool of aggregated learning data ever assembled to look deeply into the many facets and factors that impact learning outcomes. At the same time, Unizin tools enable us to get very granular with our data to provide faculty and students actionable insights about student learning patterns, trends and behaviors that can benefit them for a lifetime.
Who’s involved from UCI?
Our designated board members for the Unizin consortium are:
- Michael Dennin, Professor of Physics & Astronomgy, Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning, Dean of the Division of Undergraduate Education
- Tom Andriola, Vice Chancellor for Information, Technology & Data
In addition, Patricia Morales, Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management, serves as one of two Data Stewards for the campus (the other being Michael Dennin).
On the IT side, two groups collaborate to integrate and maintain the Unizin Data Platform:
- OIT Student Data Warehouse, under the leadership of Valerie Jones, Director, OIT Information & Data Management
- OIT Student Success Technologies, under the leadership of Briandy Walden, Acting Director, OIT Student & Academic Services
The Compass Teaching & Learning Analytics project is responsible for leveraging the UDP through a variety of dashboards, reports, and web applications. TLA acts as the central organizing and contact point for questions about Unizin and accessing the UDP, and meets routinely with staff from Unizin to help execute on our vision for its use.
UDP in Action at UCI
There are several active projects leveraging the Unizin Data Platform directly:
- ScoreShare is a tool for advisors to faciltiate advising appointments and early intervention efforts by providing access to released assignment scores on a student-by-student basis.
- The LTI Usage Dashboard, available to our campus Canvas administrators, is used to monitor usage of LTI (third-party) tools integrated with UCI Canvas, providing the campus with detailed insights into how tools are used.
- The Canvas Adoption Dashboard, also available to campus Canvas admnistrators, is used to monitor adoption of Canvas across campus and over the past 5 years, a key part of UCI’s strategy to encourage technology use in supporting students.
- (Available soon) The Canvas Student Last Access Dashboard leverages a Unizin-curated datamart to provide advisors with information about students who have not accessed Canvas in the past 5+ days.
And, currently in development is UCI Spark, a student dashboard that leverages Canvas data via the UDP in concert with campus resources to provide a novel way to guide students to helpful and timely resources.
Supporting Teaching & Learning Research
The Canvas data contained in the UDP is a rich store of student learning data, but this extensive data store has tight security controls to ensure that this data is safe and secure. However, its importance as a research resource cannot be overstated, and the Office of Information Technology is supporting several methods of accessing the UDP:
One-off data requests: If you have a one-off request for Canvas data, please keep an eye on this page as we develop a plan to support your data needs. If the project is urgent, please contact us to discuss options.
Ongoing faculty data training: A future UDP enhancement currently under development by Unizin, “Synthetic Data”, will be available later in 2024 as a training data set for how to effectively explore and use the UDP. The data is not “real”, but is intended to be statistically similar to the UDP data aggregated across the entire membership, and should provide a realistic data set to explore and learn on. Additional details are forthcoming.