Learning Analytics: Notes on the Future
For the last six weeks an open, creative commons licensed course on Learning Analytics has been running, led by George Siemens at Athabasca University. This has been hugely instructive to follow, both in terms of content from speakers, forums and readings, and to see the fantastic job the facilitator team do with the different interaction channels they use. Check it out for an excellent introduction to this fast emerging field, not without its controversial issues: e.g. Exactly how much of learning leaves explicit, computable traces which can be meaningfully harvested, aggregated and reasoned about? What are the ethics around the use of analytics? Are we at the mercy of commercial vendors? What’s special about learning and sensemaking that makes this a distinctive field, and not just a derivative of web analytics or data mining? Huge thanks to them for scaffolding and hosting this free open educational resource.
Here are the slides [PDF] from the talk I just gave, accompanying the replay, sketching some thoughts on the way things will develop…
Simon, thanks for this stimulating presentation. You’ve got my gears turning. Thought-provoking in the extreme.