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A psychological experiment known as the gorilla experiment, reprised in 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris that has since gone on to become one of the best known of its kind, exposes what many of us may not realize about the limits of our own perception. (You can try the experiment for yourself here.) The experiment consists of a video in which six participants continually pass a basketball—half don white shirts, the other half are in black. Subjects are asked to count only the number of passes made by the team in white, and then immediately following the tape are asked how many passes they counted. What over half of the subjects completely fail to notice, however, is that just a few seconds in a figure dressed in a gorilla costume enters the frame, stops right in the middle of the action to gaze at the camera, and then continues on to make its exit at the other side. This gorilla appears on screen for a full nine seconds. What the gorilla experiment does is to highlight our incredible capacity to focus on a single object, completing the task so well that we easily shut out everything else. Even when “everything else” includes something as outlandish as a gorilla.
At institutions across the globe, administrators have the job of counting the people in the white shirts. And there are a lot of them to be counted—prospective students to enroll, at-risk students to retain, seniors to see graduate, as well as major policy decisions, hiring and supporting faculty, keeping up with educational technology… the list goes on. Staying focused on all of that is challenging. Especially when you consider that often there’s a gorilla in the picture too.
Cathy N. Davidson, author of Now You See It, describes the importance of constructing collaborative environments in which “explicitly diverse, heterogeneous team members with different abilities, experiences, cultural biases, expertise, and intention” are brought together in order to enhance the group’s collective ability to see what individually they would miss, a method she refers to as “collaboration by difference.” The underlying idea is that with the right tools and partners, and a diversity of contribution and insight, we can see in much greater detail than we would be able to alone.
So how might an institution be able to cost-effectively expand its current administrative structure in order to see a much more complete picture, consisting of details from the minute to the blaringly obvious? As I’ve written before, what institutions are beginning to turn to for this purpose are academic and learning analytics, sometimes called business intelligence (BI). BI has long been used in business; in fact, you are already being analyzed every time you browse books on Amazon or watch and rate movies on Netflix. Here at Loom Learning, we’ve been developing our own tool in order to offer a highly effective way for an institution to integrate the use of an analytics tool with its administrative support. This tool is Weaver™, which will eventually work with all LMSes (we are currently looking for institutions to aid us in a pilot program so we can do this) and will combine a host of functions to provide that diversity of insight.
In order for Weaver™ to effectively display a complete picture, gorillas and all, it must not only support users at the administration level (academic analytics) but also effectively give students control of their own learning (learning analytics). And even beyond that, we see the ability for parents of K-12 students to access reports and predictive analysis able to highlight areas in which intervention might be useful, before direct contact from a teacher occurs (think of the potential of this as over 80 percent of schools are anticipating budget cuts in the upcoming year, which is sure to mean, among other things, that classrooms will become increasingly crowded and virtual classes taken from home will become an increasingly viable option). Communication with at-risk students from an early stage is one highly anticipated function of an academic and learning analytics tool: administrators want to increase revenue by increasing and maintaining enrollment and retention, faculty want the ability to manage students in ever-expanding classes, and students want to obtain degrees and go on to well-paying and fulfilling careers. Weaver™ will make all of this possible, and the gorilla will become practically unmissable.
Harriet May hmay@loomlearning.com
