With each of these projects, we'll
introduce the set of questions that
motivate the work and the key constituencies.
So here, what are the student patterns of course choice
within the gov department?
How do they change for subgroups of students?
What are the relationships between courses?
What are the learning objectives for each course?
And then, the key constituencies,
undergraduate students and the gov department.
Where do we want to be with this project one year from now?
All FAS departments actively using
a version of Enrollment View, faculty discovering
their nearest neighbor.
And here, we get to another curriculum mapping project--
Andrew Ho, who-- we'll talk about this in a minute.
The Nearest Neighbor Project has now
sort of integrated a little bit with the Enrollment View
project.
And that's where we hope these things go,
is we begin to think that the synergies and the integrations.
And then the hope from the particular point
of view of this project for curriculum mapping at Harvard
broadly--
surface enrollment patterns within departments
and across departments, teaching your class
mindful of other classes that your students are in.
And there's a pretty picture here.
And I'm not going to talk about the pretty picture,
because Dustin's going to talk about the pretty picture now.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Erin, for the introduction.
If I'm a jumpstarter, I hope I'm on the positive side
of the lead.
So my name's Dustin Tingley.
I am a professor of government.
I'm also the faculty director of VPAL research.
This is kind of a little bit of an explanation of what we do.
And we have a really fortunate role in the university--
to straddle the online space and working with our partners
in Harvard X, but also residential.
And that gives us an opportunity to be
aware of a variety of different approaches to education,
a variety of different types of data
streams that come out of those approaches,
and really trying to leverage insights that
come from both sides.
How do we help Harvard X with what we learn
from the residential space?
And how do we enhance the residential space given
what we know from Harvard X?
I should say that this is framed around VPAL research,
but in doing so, we definitely work very closely with folks
over in HUIT who, control a lot of the data
systems and whatnot.
They're a huge partner.
I'm just really glad to see some folks from HUIT here today.
So what I'm going to do, briefly,
is to just kind of layout that Harvard
has this huge, rich array of different sources of data that
touch on teaching and learning, ranging from the student
information system, the course catalog,
the Canvas Learning Management System.
This is where you're running a course,
you have a course website.
This is where you go to find a syllabus
or engage in a discussion forum or find readings, et cetera.
We have student evaluation data.
I'm not going to talk about any of that,
but that's a really rich source of data.
We have a whole range of Harvard YouTube channels.
So these are official Harvard YouTube channels,
and there's a lot of great content on it.
We have Harvard X. And then, we have a whole layer
of really just being mindful of who should get access to what
data and what information.
I don't need to get access to all of the information
that someone in institutional research can get access to.
I don't need that.
And so we're very mindful of thinking through authentication
and just sort of permissions.
And here, HarvardKey, which has really
come online in a major way in the past couple years,
has been really helpful for a variety of projects.
So the student information system, many of you
might think about this is something like my.harvard.
And this is a place where students go.
It's where they're going to do different registration
operations, et cetera.
And this is kind of not just an interface for students
and for faculty and for staff, but it also
has a big data layer behind it, right?
And that data layer is very valuable.
I'll showcase a couple of the ways
that we've been thinking about it.
And it's not just some projects that I've worked on.
But there's also been other projects
that have benefited from the nice work
that HUIT has put into architecting the database back
end for my.harvard.
So one example of this is the Enrollment View.
So this is literally just asking a question of, what courses--
if someone has taken a course in the gov department,
what were the other courses that they took?
What sequence of courses did they take?
Or, to get to Andrew Ho's brilliant idea
about nearest neighbors, if I'm teaching a course,
what are the other courses that my students are enrolled in?
That's actually really valuable information.
What are they experiencing as they are going through what
I want them to experience?
And we'll talk a little bit more about nearest neighbor
in a second.
And you can think about these things.
So this is going to be for the physics department,
so we've been working with them, as well.
So I'm teaching a class.
There are these other classes that students are enrolled in.
You can even see the second order nearest neighbor.
This is like not your neighbor, but the neighbor down street.
And what classes that overlap are happening there?
Or what's the sequence of classes that people are taking?
What have people taken before my class,
and what do people statistically tend to take afterwards?
And then, finally, there's always
questions about, like, are there trends in enrollment
that we sort of, within the department, administratively
look at?
And so this is something that we will be rolling out
to a whole range of FAS departments,
working quite closely with Harvard's
institutional research and our friends over in HUIT
to be able to do.
Another project was just saying, let's bring together easy ways
to just search course descriptions.
And this was an effort that arose out of our friends
in the Safra Center for Ethics just wanting
to know where are people teaching ethics.
And so we were able to, again, work with folks at HUIT
to be able to import all of the course description information
that we could get.
Also, grab some of that information
for some of the other schools that aren't on my.harvard
and put it in one place.
Make it searchable and do all sorts of--
be able to make nice plots of different things.
You know, a challenge of--
this is not really a challenge.
It's just sort of a reality, is that we
are a little bit spread out in terms of our data systems.
And that's OK.
That's changing.
This is a little bit of a moving target, as well.
This is not sort of fixed in stone.
It might change in the coming months and year and whatnot,
but there are some different data systems out there.
We have been working a lot with sort
of the my.harvard kind of back end,
but there are some others out there.
And one of the things that we do is
to try to think about kind of common underlying things.
So that even if people have different data systems,
we can bring that data together and have
it be meaningful to be co-located together.
A final piece that really, I think,
highlights the opportunities for merging data
from a whole variety of systems, this
is the syllabus exploration tool.
This is something that is now available to anyone in FAS.
You can go to syllabus.hmdc.harvard.edu,
and you can search across most of the syllabi that
are used in the FAS.
So how do we do that?
So what's one thing that you're supposed to do,
if you're an instructor, on your Canvas site?
What's one thing that you're supposed to do?
What should you do?
You should post your syllabus.
Now, you're going to do that in a variety of different ways,
because I can see that data.
There are particular ways we prefer you to do it,
but whatever.
We'll figure it out.
And so what we did is we--
working very closely with Dean Mike Smith--
went out and got syllabi from across all
of these different courses.
Took those files, extracted the text from them,
and then essentially made it searchable.
So you can go in, and you can find people's syllabi
and actually get the actual file that was their syllabus.
And think of these syllabi as being, essentially,
like a curated reading list.
So if you're writing a senior thesis
and you're interested in some topic,
well, one thing you could do is you could go to Google and type
in that topic.
And then who knows where you're going, right?
But why not, if you could, in a sense,
Google the inside of some of the most brilliant people's minds
in the world and see what they would suggest reading,
given your topic, that would be a much greater opportunity.
So the syllabus project took information
from Canvas, the learning management system,
on the one hand, brought it together
with some other information from the operational data storage
system in HUIT, and put those things together.
And now we have this as a product for FAS.
And furthermore, it's been written in a way
that we hope some of our friends from other schools
would be interested in joining the party.
So at some point, this could be something
like syllabus.harvard.edu and really scale
across the institution.
That's a dream right now, but I'm a jumpstarter,
so I'll leave it there.