What follows will eventually be a summary of my contribution to a the ASCILITE’2017 panel titled Are learning analytics leading us towards a utopian or dystopian future, and what can we as practitioners do to influence this?. Below you’ll find a summary of my prediction and the argument that underpins it, suggestions for more reading, the slides, and references. Argument […]
Are learning analytics leading us towards a utopian or dystopian future, and what can we as practitioners do to influence this?
Teacher DIY learning analytics – implications & questions for institutional learning analytics
The following provides a collection of information and resources associated with a paper and presentation given at ALASI 2017 – the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute in Brisbane on 30 November, 2017. Below you’ll find an abstract, a recording of a version of the presentation, the presentation slides and the references. The paper examines the DIY development and use of […]
Improving teacher awareness, action and reflection on learner activity
The following post contains the content from a poster designed for the 2017 USQ Toowoomba L&T celebration event. It provides some rationale for a technology demonstrator at USQ based on the Moodle Activity Viewer. What is the problem? Learner engagement is a key to learner success. Most definitions of learner engagement include “actively participating, interacting, and collaborating with students, faculty, […]
Introducing the Moodle Activity Viewer (MAV) & digital reno
What follows are the resources associated with a workshop being run at the University of Southern Queensland. As the title suggests, the aim is to get USQ folk started using the Moodle Activity Viewer to explore usage of Moodle activities and resources, and to briefly introduce the idea of digital renovation. Apart from the presentation slides and references below, other […]
Implications and questions for institutional learning analytics implementation arising from teacher DIY learning analytics
David Jones, Hazel Jones, Colin Beer, Celeste Lawson, Implications and questions for institutional learning analytics implementation arising from teacher DIY learning analytics, To appear in the proceedings of the 2017 Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute (ALASI 2017) Abstract Learning analytics promises to provide insights that can help improve the quality of learning experiences. Since the late 2000s it has inspired […]
Exploring options for teacher DIY learning analytics
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A few of us recently submitted a paper to ALASI’2017 that examined a “case study” of a teacher (me) engaging in a bit of DIY learning analytics. The case was used to drawing a few tentative conclusions and questions around the institutional implementation of learning analytics. The main conclusion is that teacher DIY learning analytics is largely ignored at the […]
Learning, learning analytics and multiple levels: The problem of starvation
In which I play with some analytics and use some literature in an attempt to understand why the institutional implementation of learning analytics as a starvation problem (like most institutional attempts to leverage digital technologies). In this context, I’m using the definition of starvation from computer science. Multiple time scales of human behaviour and appropriate methods In a section titled […]
Further developing research workflow
An attempt to briefly document an exploration into possibilities for enhancing my digital workflow. Main personal outcome is the modification of my research workflow to incorporate Zotfile to improve file naming and also to allow sharing of PDF files with my mobile. Sharing done via Google drive to the PDF Expert app and back again. Zotfile very nicely auto-extacting annotations […]
What’s changed in academic staff development?
The following is my initial response to this exercise from the week 3 learning path. It’s an exercise intended to get folk thinking about what practices, if any, have emerged in their disciplinary teaching context from when they were undergraduates until now. It asks them to consider some of the emerging practices mentioned in the Horizon and New Generation Pedagogy […]
My current context and some initial issues
Semester is about to start and I’m back teaching. This semester I’m part of a team of folk designing and teaching a brand new, never been taught course – EDU8702 – Scholarship in Higher Education: Reflection and Evaluation. The course is part of the Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching. In the course, we are asking the participants to focus on […]
Learning analytics, quality indicators and meso-level practitioners
“failure” (CC BY 2.0) by tinou bao When it comes to research I’ve been a bit of failure, especially when measured against some of the more recent strategic and managerial expectations. Where are those quartile 1 journal articles? Isn’t your h-index showing a downward trajectory? The concern generated by these quantitative indicators not only motivated the following ideas for a […]
Nudging up MyOpinion response rates using a gamified leaderboard
The following information is taken from and adds to the contents of a poster by Alice Brown and I for a USQ L&T Celebration Event. It describes the need for a Student Evaluation of Teaching leaderboard, how it works, and the results of some early applications (12 to 15% increases in response rates in individual courses, resulting in response rates […]
Emedding plotly graphs in WordPress posts
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Last year I started using with Perl to play with analytics around Moodle Book usage. This year, @beerc and I have been starting to play with Jupyter Notebooks and Python to play with analytics for meso-level practitioners (Hannon, 2013). Plotly provides a fairly useful platform for generating graphs of various types and sharing the data. Works well with a range […]
Bye, Bye Mendeley?
So, I have a problem. What was a wonderful open source product was bought by a big publisher. I’m an open kind of guy so this has always been a bit disquieting. It recently got a bit worse. Seems Mendeley and Elsevier products will soon be more seamless. Suggesting time to find an alternative to Mendeley — David Jones (@djplaner) […]
Early steps in developing a design system/model for Professional Learning Opportunities
A big responsibility for the new team I work with is the design, implementation and revision of Professional Learning Opportunities (PLOs) for teaching staff at our current institution. The PLO term has been gifted to us as part of the restructure process/documents that created the team. It’s a term I quite like since I’ve chosen to interpret it as covering […]
Understanding systems conditions for sustainable uptake of learning analytics
My current institution is – like most other universities – attempting to make some use of learning analytics. The following uses a model of system conditions for sustainable uptake of learning analytics from Colvin et al (2016) to think about how/if those attempts might be enhanced. This is done by summarising the model; explaining how the model is “wrong”; and, […]
