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....more...
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....more...
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....more...
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....more...
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)...more...
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 of languages and Jupyter Notebooks....more...
The following documents the (hopefully) last bit of extra work I have to undertake to prepare the digital "learning space" for EDC3100, ICT and Pedagogy. It's work that has taken most of my working day. At a time when I can't really afford it. But it's time I have to spend if I want to engage effectively in one of the most fundamental activities in teaching - know thy student....more...
In June last year I started an exploration into the value of sentiment analysis of student blog posts. This morning I've actually gotten it to work. There may be some value, but further exploration is required. Here's the visible representation of what I've done....more...
In a bit more than an hour I'll be talking to @catspyjamasnz trying to nut out some ideas for a project around LX Design and Learning Analytics. The following is me thinking out loud and working through "my issues"....more...
The following is a summary and ad hoc thoughts on Macfadyen et al (2014)....more...
The following is a place holder for two presentations that are related. They are:...more...
Trying to capture some thinking that arose during an institutional meeting re: learning analytics. The meeting was somewhat positive, but - as is not uncommon - there seemed to be some limitations around what learning analytics actually is and what it might look like. Wondering if the following framing might help it draws on points made by numerous people about learning analytics and some strong echoes of the (P)IRAC framework...more...
In Jones and Clark (2014) we drew on Damien's (Clark) development of the Moodle Activity Viewer (MAV) as an example of how bricolage, affordances and distribution (the BAD mindset) can add some value to institutional e-learning. My empirical contribution to that paper was talking about how I'd extended MAV so that when I was answering a student query in a discussion forum I could quickly see relevant information about that student (e.g. their major, which education system they would likely be teaching into etc)....more...
In short, there is definitely a pattern. In fact, there are two patterns evident:...more...
The following is a summary of McNaught et al (2009). This is one of three papers that from the same institution around the LMS that I've looked at recently....more...
Much earlier this year I was invited to participate with some folk much cleverer than I around the question of the adoption of learning analytics and a project to explore this using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Going by the date embedded in the URL of this post, that was way back in August. It's December and I'm now trying to get back to this post to capture some of my thinking....more...
In 2014 I am hoping to make some changes to BIM that will enhance the course I'll be teaching. The hope is to leverage various learning analytics to enhance student learning. The following is an attempt to use the IRAC framework to think about what might be done. Essentially a bit of brainstorming about possible future development....more...
The following is a draft version of the presentation I'll be giving at ASCILITE tomorrow. Hopefully this will go close to fitting within the 12 minute time frame....more...
An attempt at some live blogging from #ascilite starting with the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute (#a-lasi)....more...
The following is a summary and some thoughts on Lam et al (2010). It's a paper from the same authors/research from which I summarised an earlier paper....more...
One of the on-going research projects we have underway (really just starting up) is an analysis of the learning analytics literature. The following is an ad hoc record of a search into the literature around different approaches to literature analysis. The aim is to further inform the work. Essentially a summary of some readings....more...
The following is a summary and some thoughts on Lam et al (2012). The abstract from the chapter is...more...
The following is a summary of an exploration of the recent literature analysing University LMS usage and some thinking about further research....more...
And now onto Week 2 of the Coursera MOOC "Big Data in Education". Focusing on the evaluation of models - is it any good?...more...
Yet another MOOC to start. This time "Big data in education" by Ryan Baker - one of the names that spring up often in the Educational Datamining field. A coursera MOOC....more...
The following is a summary and some thoughts on...more...
With the vague idea of the IRAC framework done, it's time to take the next step, i.e. "to use the framework to analyse the extant learning analytics literature". The following is some initial thinking behind why, what and how we're thinking of doing....more...
The following is the final version of a short paper that's been accepted for ASCILITE'2013. It's our first attempt to formulate and present the IRAC framework for analysing and designing learning analytics applications. This presentation from last week expands on the IRAC framework a little and touches on some of the future work....more...
Now onto class 2 with the Data Mining with Weka MOOC....more...
The following is a "webified" version of an invited presentation at the Blended Learning 2013 Summit. This version is largely an experiment with this medium/approach to sharing the talk. The slides from the talk are shown below with a written version of what I might have hoped to have said during the talk....more...
And now for the second MOOC of the year - Data Mining with Weka from the University of Waikato. Weka is an open source data mining application. Time to find out a bit more about one of the technical aspects of learning analytics. Hoping this might be useful in terms of research with The Indicators Project (we should really update that site)....more...
Learning analytics is being enabled/driven/sparked by the concept of "big data", but for a while I've wondered just how big is the data being gathered by Universities. Preparations for a workshop earlier in the week provided an opportunity to find out....more...
A couple of weeks ago I expressed one of my reservations with the large buckets of money and time universities (and others) are currently investing in learning analytics in a blog post titled Bugger analytics, just give me useful information. My reservation is that the learning designers, data scientists, commercial software vendors, management and other members of Geohegan's (1994) technologists' alliance are so enamoured of the theoretical future possibilities of learning analytics they are ignoring (or perhaps are possibly completely ignorant) of the current information needs of learners and teachers. The following is an attempt at a small example...more...
Continuing my reading of some recent learning analytics journal articles, the following is a summary and some thoughts on...more...
The following is a summary and some reflections upon...more...
The following is a summary and some initial responses to this paper...more...
In a a prior post I wondered about the "end in mind" for university analytics projects. What follows outlines why I'm skeptical of such projects....more...
The following is a summary of and commentary on Greller and Drachsler (2012). I come to this via the JISC/CETIS report I summarised yesterday...more...
The following is a summary and some reflection upon a CETIS report (Harmelen and Workman, 2012) titled Analytics for Learning and Teaching. One of the reasons for reading this is the current considerations around reworking and resubmitting a unsuccessful OLT application around learning analytics....more...
Learning analytics is one of the research areas I'm interested in. Consequently, I've read and listened to a bit about learning analytics over recent times. In that time I've often heard Moneyball used as an example or analogy for learning analytics....more...
The following started life as a submission to the SoLAR Southern Flare Conference and is serving double purpose as a contribution to #cfhe12, which is currently looking at Big data and analytics....more...
I'm currently thinking about a potential contribution to the SoLAR Southern Flare Conference on Learning Analytics in about a month or so. The early shape of that contribution is online and my last few posts have been summarising some explorations through various areas of the literature. Not the learning analytics literature, but broader literature on which much of the learning analytics literature should be based, but of which much isn't....more...
The following is a summary of / reflection upon...more...
The following has some reflection/questions generated while reading...more...
Had some time this morning to read Analytics in Higher Education: Benefits, Barriers, Progress and Recommendations from the EDUCAUSE Centre for Applied Research. It's a report on the results of a survey and seven focus groups (involving IT and Institutional Research - IR - people from universities) attempt to "address the topics of defining analytics, identifying challenges, and proposing solutions" (Bischel, 2012, p. 5). The following uses the quotes from this report that really struck me to identify and suggest what might be the core problem I have with learning analytics. The assumption of rationality....more...
Thanks to @cj13 for the heads up about the EDUCAUSE analytics sprint in the midst of moving, conferences, end/start of term and grant writing I missed it. Found it interesting that the first thing the struck my eye was a link to this discussion titled "Faculty need how-to information for the data they do have". It's interesting because the grant application I'm writing is directly aimed in this general area. Though we perhaps have a slightly different take on the problem....more...
Another task for today is to put some finishing touches on an application for an OLT grant around learning analytics. The project - some early thinking shown here - is coming together nicely, but could always be better. Some good feedback from Rob Phillips reminded me about what the Horizon Report for Australian Tertiary Education (Johnson et al, 2012, p. 1) has to say about analytics in Oz higher ed...more...
Another day and another #ascilite12 paper to think about. This is the one where my periodic engagement is potentially driving my co-author slightly crazy. I'm sure this contribution will add further to that....more...
The following is a slightly edited version of a internal grant application that has just been funded. It is a small step towards actually moving the Indicators project a little further toward the targets we talked about so many years ago. Â My co-investigators on this grant are: Colin Beer and Professor Patrick Danaher....more...