Week 2 - A Brief Overview to Learning Analytics

Bodong Chen
January 26, 2016

Knowledge Forum Clinic

• Issues? Questions?
• Navigate in KF
• Posting/Contributing
  • What/How: self-contained ideas vs. (long) reflection posts
  • Where: dedicated views (everyone can create views!)
  • When: earlier if possible (to enable knowledge building)

General questions?

• Siemens, G. (2013). Learning Analytics: The Emergence of a Discipline. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764213498851. doi:10.1177/0002764213498851
• Bienkowski, M., Feng, M., & Means, B. (2012). Enhancing teaching and learning through educational data mining and learning analytics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. (Only pp. 25-36)
• (optional) Shum, S. B. (2012). UNESCO Policy Brief: Learning Analytics. Technical Report, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.

1. Theoretical assumptions
2. Purpose of analysis
3. Units of action, interaction, and analysis
4. Representations
   • What representations of data and representations of analytic constructs and interpretations capture these units in a manner consistent with the purposes and theoretical assumptions?
5. Analytic manipulations

(From Productive Multivocality in the Analysis of Group Interactions, ch. 2)

Canvas: a rising Learning Management System (LMS)

CanvasNet: an analytics tool aiming to provide students with feedback on their social and conceptual engagement

• Social constructivist learning
• “Learning as participation” metaphor

• Canvas APIs (application programming interfaces)
• Google Scripts (recipe)

• R (a statistical programming language)
  • read data from Google Sheet
  • social network analysis: sna and igraph packages
  • text analysis: tm package

• An R web application, for
  • students to reflect on their own participation
  • the teacher to monitor and intervene
  • …

An iterative cycle

Readings

• Scardamalia, M., Bransford, J. D., Kozma, B., & Quellmalz, E. (2012). New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building. In Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (pp. 231–300). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2324-5_5
• (optional) Shum, S. B., & Ferguson, R. (2012). Social learning analytics. Educational Technology and Society, 15(3), 3–26.

Activities

• Watch video Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms
• KF Discussion: What are some of the competencies you wish to assess? Can you think of how? Any gaps?

Ongoing LA courses at Colombia and EdinburghU

@bodong_c @BakerEDMLab Indeed. @EdinburghUni course handbook - https://t.co/VBBgNotKDK and @TeachersCollege syllabus https://t.co/xz2kIZ5bT6

— Dragan Gasevic (@dgasevic) January 20, 2016

Updates on SIGs and WGs?

Group sign-up (feel free to put down your names)