Rising to the Challenge: Exploring the Potential of the RISE Framework in Online Education

"... we are no longer blindly shooting in the dark about where we think students are struggling but can now say with some degree of certainty."

As the Director of eLearning Quality and Development at Pima Community College, I'm continually exploring how we can better harness the power of data to improve our online education outcomes. The RISE (Resource Inspection, Selection, and Enhancement) Framework has been an intriguing find in this exploration. I first learned about the RISE Framework when David Wiley visited Pima Community College and discussed the value of open-enabled pedagogy.

The cornerstone of the RISE Framework lies in its method of mapping how much time a student spends on resources and activities related to a particular assessment, against how well they do on that assessment. This process creates a scatter plot grid where the bottom right quadrant indicates a significant concern: students spending a lot of time on resources but not performing well on the assessments. These areas are where we should focus our quality review efforts.

What fascinated me about the RISE Framework was its use of scatter plots to make raw data interpretable. At Pima, we emphasize alignment through our quality review practices including the use of the Quality Matters rubric and annotations. The RISE Framework offers a practical way to leverage well-aligned courses. The more accurately we map our outcomes to our materials, activities, and assessments, the more reliable data we can gather. And when we have reliable data about where to focus our effort the more efficient that work becomes. But the best part is, we are no longer blindly shooting in the dark about where we think students are struggling but can now say with some degree of certainty.

I'm considering adopting the RISE Framework as a basis for choosing which courses to focus on for quality review and which assessments to concentrate our energies on. In doing so, I see several challenges and opportunities. Firstly, not all of our courses are as well-aligned as they should be. Ensuring the proper alignment in our courses will require a significant effort from our curriculum office and the Center for Learning Technology. Furthermore, it's essential that this alignment is accurately reflected in the master courses that our faculty are using.

Our next step will be to pick a high-impact course for a thorough mapping and assessment. However, I'm keen to know: what roadblocks do you anticipate we might encounter. How might we overcome these challenges? Do you have any thoughts or strategies to share? I encourage all of us to think of this as an opportunity for collective brainstorming and problem-solving. Let's crowdsource ideas, think innovatively, and collaborate to successfully integrate the RISE Framework into our online education strategy.

Bodily, R., Nyland, R., & Wiley, D. (2017). The RISE Framework: Using Learning Analytics to Automatically Identify Open Educational Resources for Continuous Improvement.?The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning,?18(2). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i2.2952

Tags: #eLearning, #DataDriven, #RISEFramework, #OnlineEducation, #LearningAnalytics, #OER, #ContinuousImprovement