Executive Summary

The main purpose of this project is to analyse the given data and give a brief overview as to whether Canvas is an effective means of learning in terms of improving a students exam mark. With the main discovery being that there was a positive relationship between a student’s use of Canvas and their grades.


Full Report

Initial Data Analysis (IDA)

library(readxl)
PROJECT3 <- read_excel("~/Desktop/DATA1001files/Project 3/PROJECT3.xlsx")

The data was retrieved from the University’s student system, provided by Institutional Analytics and Planning. It consists of 10,845 anonymous student grades within junior Mathematics units of study (UoS) in 2018. The main limitation was the data was based upon junior Mathematics UoS, so when analysing the usefulness of Canvas it’s hard to say whether an online learning tool will overall assist students in helping them obtain higher grades.
To ensure that the data supplied was ethical a fake student identifier was put into place so that the student’s marks could be kept anonymous.


Average marks for domestic and international students and the frequency at which they accessed canvas

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data=PROJECT3, aes(x = Canvas, y = Mark, fill = Status)) + geom_bar(stat="identity", position = position_dodge()) + labs(x="Access to Canvas during the semester", y="Average marks") +
  scale_y_continuous(name="Average marks", limits=c(0, 100)) + scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(0,14,1))

#Analysis

After coming across an article and concluding that online learning resources in student learning has been proven to cater for the individual’s critical thinking and hence can contribute to better and improved marks (Carmichael and Farrell 2012). The main focus area was to look at whether USYD’s chosen online learning tool “Canvas” was affective in helping students to obtain better marks. Taking into consideration that if a student hadn’t accessed Canvas at all during the Semester it was denoted as a ‘0’. Overall there is a general trend in that those who accessed Canvas more frequently achieved higher marks with there being slight fluctuations around the 4-7 week access and the outlier regarding the international students who accessed Canvas only one week out of the thirteen.

Average marks of Students in relation to STUVAC Canvas use

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data=PROJECT3, aes(x = STUVAC, y = Mark, fill = Semester)) + geom_bar(stat="identity", position = position_dodge()) + labs(x="Access to Canvas during STUVAC", y="Average marks") +
  scale_y_continuous(name="Average marks", limits=c(0, 100))

#Analysis

We then honed into looking at whether Canvas was an effective means of study prior to final exams. It was postulated that from both semesters, those who accessed Canvas during STUVAC did obtain higher marks than those who didn’t. Likely indicating that those students took use of the learning materials and practice exams provided to prepare themselves for the exam period. If so then Canvas can be assumed useful as a beneficial resource in increasing final exam marks. However, there is such a slight difference between those who did access it compared to those who didn’t that it is hard to say if it really was such a significant aid in final preparation.

Comparing the range of marks of students from different age categories

boxplot(Mark~Age,
data=PROJECT3,
main="Average marks of Students of different age categories",
xlab="Student Status",
ylab="Average marks",
col="light blue",
border="black"
)

#Analysis

A final analysis was taken to see if a student’s age impacted the marks being recieved, thus looking at whether Canvas wasn’t the only factor accounting for the individual’s mark. After looking at an article based upon the experience of older students when using online learning tools such as online tutorials and concluding that they had slight difficulties navigating the site etc. we expected there to be a lower range of marks for those over 25. However, this was not the case proving that nowadays in such a technologically savy population, majority of undergraduate student’s can use tools such as Canvas.