This story started in Aalto University, late 2016. Professor Jani Romanoff said to planning officer Ville Kivimäki that we need to have another way to collect course feedback. The feedback needs to be meaningful and a greater percentage of the students needs to participate.
From this starting point, the design phase of the project started.
– The project did not have much resourcesm at the beginning, but we had ideas and resilience, says Ville Kivimäki, co-founder and project manager of the pilot project.
Over the years theory and practice, ideas and feasibility related to IT architecture materialized into Dynamic Feedback System, which came later more widely know as Course Diaries. The Course Diaries is now being used as an integrated system in Moodle enviroment in Aalto University. Additionally, a mobile version for iOS and Android is available. Teachers have been able to start using the application as a self-service since 2021.
The Course Diaries is currently running in Aalto University. This page focuses on the research done around the Course Diaries and related topics. The aim of this page is to share materials related to the project based on open access principles. Through research we can share insights of the phenomena related to having a structured learning diary, such as the Course Diaries, type of approach to teaching and learning.
This is the first post. Lots more is coming. And if you are interested in learning more about this rather novel approach to building learning analytics applications and procedures, don’t hesitate writing to us.
Ville Kivimäki
Doctoral Researcher