Afternoon of Day 2 of SoLAR

Second paper session

First steps in learning analytics with LearnTrak
Susan Tull
Unfortunately I couldn’t watch this talk –  Prezi which always makes me dizzy so instead I will refer to an external summary of the project from
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/trak-first-steps-learning-analytics

which includes the following summary of major points:

• A current focus at the University of Canterbury is to develop a culture of institution-wide accountability for the attraction, admission, support, retention, and success of students.
• Lecturers are encouraged to become part of the early intervention process and develop skills using this first step of the system so that they can effectively engage with learning analytics.
• LearnTrak software lets lecturers view data on student accesses to resources and activities in a user-friendly graphical form.
• An organization using Moodle can adopt this tool and Canterbury's method of implementation as a first step toward implementing learning analytics.

There were lots of very positive comments on this paper so it was disappointing to miss it.

 Moving beyond a fashion: likely paths and pitfalls for learning analytics
David Jones, Colin Beer

This was a great presentation on paths and pitfalls – admitted he had intended to be more negative, but changed his mind as a result of Susan's presentation. He also admitted to being a glass half-empty person so said we should bear that in mind when he says we are into the gold rush days of learning analytics.

After mentioning his previous Indicators Project, he posed his big (and refreshing) question How can we stop Learning Analytics from becoming a fad? He said there is some value in Learning Analytics but how can we prevent the fad behaviour which consists of big unrealistic expectations, poor implementation, then abandonment and moving on to the next fad.

He showed Birnbaum's 2000 model as an alternative to Gartner’s Hype cycle 

One of the terrific images in his presentation was of a swamp - but he had some suggested paths through the swamp which he referred to as changing the game of education.

Do it to – (academics) dominant model – managing from the dark side. Data warehouses likely to fail or not used very much
Do it for – (academics and students) – change thinking and planning
Do it with – evolutionary development – failures of rationality - Have to embed learning analytics in the design of courses

Link to his paper on this
Predicts no-one will be taking about Learning Analytics in 5 years time
David has posted his slides and references.

Exploring data from existing systems that are useful in assisting student learning: An Indonesian Perspective
Yasmin Erika Faridhan
PhD student – also using Prezi
Great to see a doctoral student here and sorry I can't provide more detail of her Prezi talk. Instead here are exerts from her abstract:

In Indonesia, extracting data for learning analytics purposes is not an easy job.  Although internet and information technology usage in Indonesian higher education has been growing fast in this twenty-first century, their integration in the form of student learning systems has only been surfacing recently. Compared to other countries in the Southeast Asia region, Indonesia is lagging behind Singapore and Malaysia in adopting educational technology to support student learning.

In this presentation I am going to introduce my PhD study on learning analytics in the Indonesian higher education environment.  I would be very interested in starting conversations with other researchers who have experiences with learning analytics, especially in an international context.  My work has a statistical focus and I would also be interested in finding out who else is working in this area.  This research is presented in order to obtain feedback that may provide insight into the next step of this project.

The final session was essentially about where to from here?


Rob Phillips gave an interesting report back from Australasian Council for Open and Distance Education (ACODE) in terms of the interesting work being done by members, and the projects they have decided to undertake including completing an annotated bibliography briefing papers on LA.

There was a panel session involving 4 of us either talking about what we are doing in our institutions or what we should be doing. Rather than what often happens at a gathering or early adopters, there was much discussion about ensuring we don't repeat the mistakes of the past - learning design and learning objects were mentioned as two areas that there was great enthusiasm about but haven't lived up to their earlier promise.

One aspect of this was ethics and there was discussion about whether students should be able to opt out of having their data included. A brilliant suggestion was made about the need to have a teaching and learning ethics committee which would mirror the research ethics committee 

The final talk was from Siobhan Lenihan who is Director of Grants and Fellowships for the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). She ended on the day on a good note by announcing that one of the first topics to be commissioned in 2013 by  OLT will be in the general area of Learning Analytics. There is an indicative budget of $1.5M for 4 projects, one of which will be on the topic of Learning Analytics. There seemed to be a general feeling in the audience that rather than these being competitive grants, we should try to find ways for everyone to collaborate.