The OTLT Research and Analytics team partners with instructors to adopt effective teaching practices that are supported by data and impact student learning. They can help instructors better understand their students, analyze learning outcomes, and create more equitable courses.

Course Profile

The course profile is an interactive dashboard that uses student data to generate visualizations to help you better understand the students taking your courses. The course profile serves as an entry point for deeper reflection about data-informed teaching. Based on what you learn, it may spark further questions about your students.

A course profile may help answer questions such as:  

• How many students are taking this course for the second time? 
• How might students taking the course be different in fall and spring? 
• What courses do students take prior to this course? What other courses are they taking now? 
• What majors take the course? 
• Are there more first-generation students in the course than in prior semesters? 

Classroom and Curriculum Data and Analysis

To help instructors to make data-informed decisions about their teaching and help departments understand the students in their programs, the Research and Analytics team collects, aggregates, and analyzes a wide range of data about student learning and outcomes.  

These reports are customized to answer your specific questions and include the tables, figures, and statistical analyses needed to draw inferences.

What aggregated data can we provide? 

• Student demographics.
• Course outcomes, placement scores, and grade-point average. 
• Students' trajectories in their majors and degrees earned. 
• Student engagement with learning tools such as ICON, UICapture (Panopto), Top Hat, eText, and many others.
• Students' perceptions, motivation, and sense of belonging via surveys we administer. 

What questions can we help you answer? 

• Do students who procrastinate on assignments and quizzes perform worse than students who do not?
• What activities are successful students engaged in?
• Do your homework assignments and quizzes align with your exams?
• Are there factors that indicate a student may drop your course?
• Are there factors that indicate a student may change majors?

Course Equity Insights

The changing demographics and circumstances of enrollment at Iowa mean that students are likely to come into your course with a wide range of experiences, skills, and perspectives. Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in all forms—race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion—as an asset.

The goal of the course equity insights is to identify any existing equity gaps in your course based on students’ identities, to reflect on how you can better support all students, and to learn some strategies to teach more inclusively. This report is provided alongside a consultation with teaching experts from the OTLT Center for Teaching.