The great crane incident meant we had to change venue - our original space was right next to the crane and it decided to close the adjacent spaces in preparation for the weekend attempt to remove the damaged crane.
The opening keynote today was Alfred Essa whose presentation was:
The opening keynote today was Alfred Essa whose presentation was:
Innovation at the intersection of MOOCs and Learning Analytics
He started out by saying he’s not sure why he was invited to do
a keynote .... well, that's why Alfred - my experience is that it is the humble folk who often have the most interesting things to say :)
He showed a movie trailer from Moneyball. The main point of showing the video would
have been to show the way the use of data analytics transformed a poorly performing
baseball team to a leader
One of the interesting lines from the trailer was “we’ve
got to think differently” I was thinking at the time how many people say that when things are not going well, but how difficult it can be to make the
changes necessary to actually think differently – most end up doing things in much the
same way.
His challenge was How quickly can we mobilise the research
agenda around analytics?
In another candid moment Alf said "I'm not going to say much about MOOCs so it's a
misleading title … but it’s really about scale – how can we bring cost down?"
In talking about our challenges he mentioned:
Student success – students are taking longer and longer
to complete their courses, and attrition is higher
Institutional effectiveness - we have to be able to provide evidence that our students
are learning
How can we do this at scale? He talked about 3 levels of analytics
Learning Analytics – need to focus on the learner as individual (mentioned Ken
Robinson's work highlighting our existing factory model – everyone presumed to start the same and has same
experience – how to meet needs of individual learner)
Academic Analytics – retention rates, focus
in institutions, course, department
Enterprise analytics – looks at wider data – all systems, all data at the enterprise level
This short list can appear overwhelming to most on where to start imho, but he then described three
levels of maturity
1 data access + reporting - data about the past – most of us are here
2 predicted future – forecasting and
predictive modelling (techniques such as predictive model)
3 desired future – holy grail – how do I
want things to be in the future – key is finding the optimal path – not about
more data – I have more data than I need
Everyone seemed a little taken when Alf put up the words of the famous Sting song – I realised for the first time, the true meaning of the lyrics
every step you take,
every
move you make,
every bond you break,
every step you take
.. I'll be watching you
We are capturing a lot of (surveillance) data
He used a great metaphor for learning analytics - Student as pilot, teacher as air traffic control. Student needs data!
He noted something I have also often reflected on - why do people (such as physicists) abandon data for anecdotes when talking about education? Loved his reference to Lee Schulman's quote “the plural of anecdote is not data”
He referred to Eric Mazure's work in trying to inprove eduaction
using data
We know very little about learning (not sure I completely agree with this ...)
The importance of predictive modelling – very interesting comparison:
Weak human + good machine + better process
can beat
strong human + good machine + inferior process
Predicted a big area for the future is behavioural economics –
mentioned 2 books -
and
We behave in irrational ways all the time
and it is predictable. This gives us some basis for framing choices in
a different way – eg when enrolled in a program, students make choices of the
sequence of subject – make bad choices all the time – can we use optimisation
to help students make smarter choices to provide better pathways?
Alfred finished up by demonstrating some wonderful D2L tools to help teachers visualise individual progress of students and their social networking activity. Access to this should be that we can design a personalised intervention to
get the students back on track
Closed with "You and I have a once in a lifetime opportunity to change the vector of learning"
Alfred said he would put his slides up - watch his Slideshare account
Paper sessions
Flip with care
Started out by posing the questions
Flip Learning? Or change the balance?
His view – its about time BUT Flip with care
How can we gather meaningful data on what users do
I really liked his next slide on "Privacy as currency. Users pay with their
(loss of) privacy"
The discussion was on what is affordable in terms of privacy?
Showed a browser add-in – embedded in the LMS. A Moodle instance. For
each individual student there was a graph including – attempted question, was correct/ incorrect/ and looked at
responses. This is very useful for not only the academic teaching this class but also for looking at
the level of engagement of other classes – is my class more or less engaged
Presentation available at www.slideshare.net/abelardo_pardoCharacterising student exploration strategies using inquiry-based learning resources
Barney Dalgarno, Gregor Kennedy, Sue Bennett
Project is mainly about inquiry-based learning project but is situating it today within LA
Showed some great simulations on blood alohol and global warming – they did a ‘scientific study’ with randomisaiton and pre- and post-test testing. Found students didn't learn a great deal in either mode. But then looked at the degree to which they were systematic in their approaches and found significant differences.
Andrew Dekker, Kirsten Zimbardi, Phil Long et al
Age-old problems of feedback “lack of
critical anaysis’ is not useful for a student
Showed new project called UQMarkup
iPad interface so markers could get
documents onto their device so they can mark anywhere
audio annotations. Course coordinator dashboard looks great
There was comment on twitter about a similar
project:
Showed lots of graphs on how long students look at
feedback etc, length of audio annotation
how students move through document, how
many times they listen to the audio feedback
Student feedback – some prefer written
feedback, others felt it was more personal
Will post slides of presentation and also software up as open-source +1
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