ALASI 2022 – special call to schools!
I’m delighted to say we are hosting the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute for a day and a half 8-9 December.
Learning Analytics has been dominated to date by higher education, but this is changing as ed-tech products get more data-intensive, and now AI-enabled, and business intelligence services and trained staff become part of school life. So this year we are particularly encouraging school leadership and teachers to join us, to share progress in their contexts, and learn from peers within and beyond the school sector. This also includes those in government education departments at state and federal level.
Learning Analytics is particularly focused on how we can harness the power of data science to make sense of student data in a timely manner, to close the feedback loop — either to the student, or to help their teachers make suitably differentiated interventions in time to make a difference to the outcome. (This is in contrast to what has been termed Academic Analytics to help school leaders reflect on cohort-level outcomes with more conventional school data, but not at the speed and detail needed to help individual learners on a weekly basis.) Some examples of LA in schools are in this “LA in schools” collection, several papers in this collection on LA for 21st century competencies, this lit review on LA for knowledge creation/inventing, and this work on researcher/teacher partnerships to design LA for a school LMS.
Critical questions arise, of course, around the responsible use of educational data — whether what is being counted and visualised on all those glossy dashboards is educationally valuable, who gets to design it, who gets to interpret it, and what actions may flow. To that, we might add concerns from some quarters about the growing role of data-intensive companies in public education (especially with the pandemic-driven rush online), and the privacy tradeoffs we are willing to negotiate for cloud services.
So we are inviting you to participate in a School Show & Tell Panel…
- We are hoping school leadership and teachers will be interested in sharing their experiences with learning analytics, platforms and their own data practices with the community.
- In the Show and Tell portion, leadership and teachers will have an opportunity to demonstrate a tool or approach they are using in their school and discuss their experience. Each presenter will be given a 10-15 minute time slot.
- Presentations may take the form of a digital poster, short series of slides, or a demonstration. Presenters are also encouraged to present works in progress, questions or issues a school may be working on around the use of learning analytics.
- All school presenters would then participate in a panel discussing their work, experience and critical insights into the use of learning analytics in schools.
- The ALASI deadline for submissions is 20 October, but we are happy to extend proposals for this schools panel to 1 November. Please contact Sarah Howard and me if you have any questions, or suggestions of hot topics you’d love to see covered: Simon.BuckinghamShum@uts.edu.au; sahoward@uow.edu.au
Longer sessions: In addition, if anyone would like a longer slot for a deeper dive interactive session, there are 45min and 90min slots available. See the website for the interactive formats you might use. Deadline 20 Oct.
We want to create an attractive day for the schools community, and hope this is a pre-cursor to a larger event in 2023 bringing school and higher education learning analytics practitioners together.
