UBC’s Learning Analytics Hackathons offer students an opportunity to work with real learning data (either your own or anonymized data) and explore how analytics can support learning and student success. The next hackathon is coming up in the fall of 2022. Register for the hackathon here.
Next Hackathon: November 2022
Co-hosted by the UBC Learning Analytics Team, LAVA, Open UBC, and Sauder Learning Services, the Learning Analytics Hackathons provide an opportunity to work with real data, brainstorm, and then prototype or build tools to address challenges that face students.
Register for the hackathon here.
Past events
Spring 2020: Student Dashboards Hackathon
The details of the hackathon can be found in the Github repo.
November 2019: Learning Analytics Hackathon
Over 50 students, researchers, and instructors attended UBC’s sixth learning analytics hackathon on November 2 and 3, spending the weekend creating apps and dashboards to improve student learning and experiences. Learning analytics is an emerging field that aims to use educational data – such as activity data generated in learning management systems like Canvas – to improve teaching and learning.
March 2019: Learning Analytics + Canvas API Hackathon
UBC held its fifth learning analytics hackathon on March 29 and 30, giving students experience analyzing and visualizing educational data while exploring the emerging field of learning analytics.
The two-day event kicked off with a design-thinking workshop focused on encouraging students to reflect on their experiences at UBC and the problems they’d like to tackle using data. On day two, students were offered workshops that took them through each stage of a data analytics project, learning how to extract, analyze, and visualize data in a way that would be useful to other students. Students had the option of working with their own personal data from Canvas — UBC’s online learning platform — or data from a course created specifically for the Hackathon.
October 2018: Learning Analytics + Canvas API Hackathon
UBC’s Canvas API Hackathon took place on October 27 and 28, 2018, with more than 100 students signing up to spend their weekend creating apps and dashboards for Canvas — UBC’s new online learning platform.
The Hackathon gave students the chance to learn about and explore the Canvas API (application program interface), which allows users to write programs to interact with Canvas. Over the course of the weekend, students also designed and built tools for other students using the Canvas API.
March 2018: Learning Analytics Hackathon 3.0
Do UBC students need a Tinder-style app that “matches” them with possible research topics? How can we design tools that help students know if they’re on track to succeed in an online course? On March 10 and 11, students, researchers and instructors came together for the Learning Analytics Hackathon 3.0 to brainstorm and prototype tools to address these types of questions.
The event attracted more than 100 participants who had the chance to work with open learning data from Harvard and the Open University (UK).
January 2017: Learning Analytics Hackathon 2.0
In January 2017, the Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Learning Analytics Visual Analytics group hosted Hackathon 2.0.
The event was an opportunity for like-minded people to meet and share their passion for data analysis. The hackathon was also aimed at raising the profile and visibility of learning analytics. Learning research data can give instructors feedback about their teaching approaches and resources, and how they’re working in their classrooms. It can inform departments about why certain classes are more popular than others and thus support planning at the program level.
October 2015: UBC’s First Learning Analytics Hackathon
In October 2015, the Learning Analytics Visual Analytics (LAVA) group held the first ever learning analytics hackathon at UBC. Participants with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise applied a variety of approaches to analyzing learning-related data. Some used classroom observation data to better understand how learning unfolds, while others used data from a learning management system to identify patterns in how learners use available materials.
According to Leah Macfadyen, program director of Evaluation and Learning Analytics at the Faculty of Arts, the idea for the hackathon came about in one of the group’s weekly meetings, after a member brought in a large data set and asked for help. The group had a lot of fun tossing around ideas about how to analyze the data and how to best present the results. The outcome was so successful that the group wondered, “Why not make it bigger? Why not have a hackathon?”