Impact

Priority and Funding

We expect the bulk of any costs to be the resource cost for the Development team’s time. We don’t anticipate a cost for the storage areas for data processing. 

Any costs will come from the Distance Learning at Scale programme budget. 

Impact and Dependencies

• The project is dependent on there being resource available within the Applications Software Development and Applications Development Technology teams to work with the project team to design and build the data storage environment and any code required for decrypting and processing the data. 

• The Learning Analytics project to set up the OnTask environment will be dependent on this project to ensure that data is provided to OnTask regularly and reliably and in a format that OnTask can use. 

• The pilot programmes will be dependent on this project to confirm the user journey in relation to data, particularly when moving from the MicroMasters modules to the capstone, and from the capstone to the Online Masters. 

Project Risks

1. There may be a delay in securing resource from the Development team. This would impact the schedule of this project, and any projects dependent on this one (such as the setting up of the OnTask environment). 

2. The format in which the data is provided when downloaded from the partner platform may be difficult to make sense of, particularly for click stream data. The amount of work required to identify and interpret the data needed and to write code to deliver this data in a more useable format may be more than what we have available. 

3. If the data is not interpreted correctly, this could lead to the OnTask tool providing unreliable results, and providing learners with inappropriate coaching feedback. 

4. If data processes are not compliant with legal and university policy, this could leave the university open to reputational damage and prosecution.