D2L Intelligent Agents

My first look at Intelligent Agents in Desire2Learn.

Having spent some time working on a Data Analytics project for MnSCU that would have served as an early alert system for online students not making good progress, I've been curious to see how deep the functionality runs in the D2L Intelligent Agents (IA) tool. The short answer is that there's some basic functionality there that might prove beneficial to some users, but the tool falls short of being a full featured Army soldier (you know, Be All That You Can Be!). (CC-by Flickr photo by Sarah G...)

I've recorded a narrated slide show that will illustrate the basics. In the slides you'll see: (a) where to access the IA tool, (b) how to create a new agent, (c) how to write a customized (sort of) email to be triggered by the agent, (d) how to schedule (or not) the agent to run when you want it to, (e) what happens when the agent is run, (f) and some pros and cons about the IA tool.

Click the green triangle Play button at the bottom of the frame to listen to the narration for the slides (or not). For better views of the screen shots, click the Full Screen icon in the lower right corner. (NOTE: Slideshare has since removed the audio functionality)

Basically, there are a few good things in this tool. You can receive notifications (and/or also send them to students via their D2L email address) for the lack of login activity for a specified number of days. You can also receive notifications when a student has performed poorly (or performed well, if you prefer) on a particular assessment that they have completed.

There are several shortcomings that I feel need to be pointed out. The IA tool could be very useful if these things are added in the near future:

  1. The login agent only works at the system login level, not at the course access level. However, faculty will mainly want to know who isn’t accessing their specific course, which is where the agent was created in the first place, so this is only logical. With version 9, D2L added information to the User Progress tool to indicate the last time the student accessed the course homepage. Now they absolutely need to make this information available for the IA tool. Slide 14 specifically addresses this concern.
  2. Currently the release conditions for an agent require an action on the part of the student, such as you took a quiz and got a high or low score, etc. However, it is usually more valuable for the faculty to know (and for students to get an email) when they are not doing something – didn’t take the quiz, haven’t posted to discussion forums, etc.
  3. There isn't a way to create an agent that looks at overall user progress based on the overall grade book score, such as "you have only received 50% or less of the points available so far in this course, and your immediate attention is needed." The agent needs to be available to run on an overall view of user progress rather than just on one or more individual items in the course.

I contacted D2L about a future road map for the development of the IA tool. I received a reply from Matt T. He said, "I don’t have any details on specific time lines to address any of these or an overall road map for the tool, but I agree all three would be great additions."

My first grade for the IA tool is a solid C (I was always a tough grader, just ask my accounting students from back in the day). It is a step in the right direction, and has really great potential moving forward, BUT, it does need to move forward with additional enhancements to really meet expectations.

Comments

Dr. T said…
I absolutely agree that the inability to create an intelligent agent based on NOT doing something, like a quiz, is a MAJOR flaw. It seems to me that whoever created this feature did not think very carefully as to how an instructor would actually use this feature.
September 17, 2010 9:09 PM
Unknown said…
Agreed, a C is all it's worth at the moment. I look forward to seeing this tool mature. communications and prompts based on grades, student AND staff activity/inactivity.
September 19, 2010 7:24 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more