Building Terracotta: A Platform for Conducting Randomized Controlled Experiments in the LMS

One of the most urgent questions in education research is “What kinds of learning activities improve student success?” Unfortunately, even with terabytes of data gushing out of our e-learning systems, we still have trouble inferring what works. This is because relationships between learning activities and student success are just correlational-a learning activity might cause students to succeed, but it’s also possible that successful students are just more likely to engage in the learning activity. To identify what works, we need more than data-we need to be able to conduct experiments.
As part of the EDUCAUSE Industry and Campus Solutions Series, in this session we will describe our vision for enabling teachers and researchers to easily run experiments in their classes, and we’ll unveil Terracotta, an experiment builder that integrates with the Canvas learning management system, the product of a collaboration between Indiana University and Unicon.