How Does Skillways Enable Job Readiness?
Strada recently published its report stating that for the first time in the U.S., the number of jobs exceeds the number of qualified people available to fill them. Jason Wingard, President of Temple University, also published an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed that the platform of Higher Ed is on fire and that changing the value proposition for students is urgent as enrollments have declined 7.4% over the last two years.
It’s clear there is a crisis in Higher Education, but what are the actionable ways institutions can address it? Skillways, our learning experience design, delivery, and analytics solution can help. In short, Skillways plugs into your existing LMS to enable the design of learning to directly expose job readiness and change the value proposition to solve both of the burning issues stated above, incentivising students and supporting their success towards careers.
Getting to Actionable Insights
Skillways optimizes the learner experience and curates measurable academic learning outcomes, and also maps to one or more industry, career, and/or employment skills. Courses created with Skillways’ learning paths and associated curriculum maps can be embedded into any learning management system (LMS), portal, or web application to deliver a learner-focused experience with rich learning content and activities that have granular outcomes, mapped performance criteria, and measurement so as to facilitate data-driven evidence of achievement and skills.
The Skillways platform has the ability to syndicate learning units so that a unit can be used in many courses but is updated in one place, giving a client the ability to use the learning units across multiple courses and programs while maintaining the integrity of the content.
How It Works: A Primer on Data Insights
Data is simply a collection of facts. With these facts, we can begin to formulate analytics, the use of tools, processes, and visual interpretation to combine and examine sets of data to identify patterns, relationships and trends. The goal of analytics is to answer specific questions, and discover new insights.
Broadly, insights are a deeper understanding of a situation. In the context of data and analytics in education, the word insight can refer to a learner, instructor, or administrator discovering a pattern in data or a relationship between variables that they didn’t previously know existed.
For example, in the Progress area of Skillways, an instructor notices that only 25% of the class completed an assessment at a passing level - why is that? Perhaps the activity instructions aren’t clear. Or, there was not enough coverage of the material to meet learners where they are prior to the assessment.
Insights are an “aha moment” that can elicit further inquiry and provide an opportunity for us to make better data-driven decisions, not just based on gut instinct.
Skillways Inquiry Map
The First Step:
Analyzing the Core Data Sets and Insights of a Course
The amount of data that can be pulled from the Skillways platform grows as the platform grows. As shown in the Skillways Inquiry Map (found on the left), Ease Learning focuses on creating insights that can be aggregated from four main domain areas: Activity, Time, Engagement, and Performance. The map only shows a small subset of possible inquiries that can manifest into informative insights.
Data is used to provide Continuous Improvement Analytics (CIA), which highlight learner gaps across curriculum and socio-economic backgrounds, which in turn dramatically improves performance against DEI initiatives
As part of a CIA plan, we start with providing a defined set of common inquiries that can be informed by analyzing a core set of data points. From these, we can derive useful insights over the term of a single course or training within two of the domains: Activity and Performance.
These domains are manifested through the Activity and Outcome views of the Progress area of Skillways, which provides real-time interaction of course-level information in two categories of learning design, Outcome Mastery; and Activity Completion and Performance. These categories are described in detail in the “Defining Your Actionable Data Insights” section in our white paper.
As the amount of courses or training grows and their frequency of offerings within your program also grows, more data can be gleaned, and thus lead to deeper insights and elicit further inquiries. Initially, however, the first step is to understand the process and benefits of utilizing the data currently available to you at the course-level.
Activity View: Performance / Completion
Defining Actionable Data Insights
To use the data and analytics gleaned from Skillways, the insights that you define should be actionable. A good starting point is to ask…What are the specific and relevant insights that can lead to actions which can <insert here!>. “Insert here” is a placeholder for the outcomes that you’ve identified as important to your learners or program.
For example: What are the specific and relevant insights that can lead to actions which can improve a learners participation in an online course? Possible insight might be: to what extent are learners interacting with peers, their instructor?
Skillways Core Data Points and Insights
Outcome Mastery
Outcome mastery refers to learners’ level of achievement of learning outcomes. Through the outcome view in progress, we can identify the level at which learners are mastering learning outcomes (i.e. mastered, proficient, progressing, etc.) and also see what percentage of the activities associated with the learning outcomes they have completed.
How can we use this insight?
Outcome mastery insights can be used in several ways. Outcomes that are not being mastered typically reveal learning gaps that need to be addressed. Through the Outcome View in Progress, we can easily identify learning activities associated with outcomes and find out which activity or activities should be revisited and where to supplement or scaffold learning. Since outcomes can be associated with industry-related skills, identifying outcomes that learners are not mastering and remedying issues with associated activities, can have a direct impact on increasing learners' achievement of skills and competencies.
Activity Completion and Performance
Activity completion and performance shows us the percentage of learners who have completed activities in the course and their overall performance on those activities. The charts in Progress show us a holistic view of the cohort as a whole, but we can drill down to see individual performance of learning activities as well.
How can we use this insight?
Activity completion and performance insights allow us to easily pinpoint activities learners are struggling with and determine where supplemental resources or a different learning approach may be necessary to improve performance. Through views in progress we can see which learners have participated in activities and which learners have not. These engagement insights allow us to identify learners at risk, so we can intervene and provide additional resources or support before it is too late. Activity and completion insights can and should be used with outcome mastery insights to identify which outcomes are at risk of being achieved and determine steps for enhancing or replacing current activities with more appropriate or targeted assignments.
Sample Skills Performance heat map report from Skillways
Learning Outcomes View: Performance/Completion
This example from Skillways shows that the nursing skills from the ACCN accreditation (shown at the top of the graphic) are the primary driver of the heat map with the academic Learning Outcomes mapping as secondary. It provides a simple view to identify where learning gaps exist and provides an opportunity to modify the course design to better serve all students with courses that develop the in-demand skills that build job readiness..
Why Job Readiness Can’t Wait.
Higher Ed. institutions have a tremendous opportunity but it’s not one with a long runway. As President Wingard said in his opinion piece, “Higher Ed Must Change or Die.” Institutions must act now in order to help meet the demand for a skilled workforce, a workforce whose skills match those needed by employers. In meeting this demand, they will also help change the perceived value that current and future students will have on the value of their degree.
If you share the concern as we do with Dr. Wingard, contact us today and let’s build a plan for your institution together.
