Niall Sclater is Consultant and Director at Sclater Digital Ltd and is currently carrying out work for Jisc in Learning Analytics.
The latest Lace Project event was held in the illustrious surroundings of the Allard Pierson Museum at Amsterdam University this week. The focus this time was on open learning analytics. After some lightening presentations on participants’ interests in the area, we split into groups to look at what exactly open meant in the context of […]
Jisc today released a new report: Learning Analytics: the current state of play in UK higher and further education. It was written after a series of visits I made recently to universities and colleges across the UK which were known to be carrying out interesting work in learning analytics. I was inspired by campuses filled […]
I’m back from yesterday’s excellent Workshop on Ethics & Privacy Issues in the Application of Learning Analytics in Utrecht organised by LACE and SURF. Hendrik Drachsler from the Open University of the Netherlands kicked off the session by presenting a background to learning analytics and some of the resulting ethical and privacy issues. He mentioned the situation in […]
When I blogged about learning analytics systems being developed by vendors of student information systems (SISs) I mentioned Tribal’s emerging system, Student Insight, which it’s been developing with the University of Wolverhampton. Tribal’s SITS:Vision product is used by over half of UK higher education institutions. Meanwhile the company’s ebs4 SIS (or MIS as it’s known […]
In previous posts I’ve looked at the emerging tools for monitoring user engagement, and adding more sophisticated engagement metrics. I’ve also examined the learning analytics systems being offered by vendors of virtual learning environments (learning management systems) and student information systems. VLEs and SISs are the places where most data about students and their learning […]
While VLE vendors would like their systems to be at the heart of an institution’s learning analytics efforts, vendors of student information systems (SISs) are now attempting to place their products in the analytics driving seat. The SIS (also known as the student record system) is a vital product for any educational institution. It includes data […]
Vendors are rapidly developing products for analysing learners and their activities. There’s a battle going on between the companies whose primary product is the VLE, those which sell student information systems (SISs) and those who have developed business intelligence systems for industry in general but are now targetting the education sector as a key market. […]
I’ve described some of the basic reporting functionality available for Moodle and Blackboard but this is just scratching the surface of what is possible with learning analytics. In this post I’ll look at ways in which analytics from other data sources such as video and ebooks are being brought into the VLE to help gain […]
In my last post I described four types of learning analytics products. Here I’ll go into more detail around some of the VLE-based engagement reporting tools. These products for Blackboard and Moodle sit within the virtual learning environment (VLE/LMS), look at its data only, and provide simple indications of a student’s progress, raising flags when […]
Every educational institution wants its learners to reach their full potential. Learning analytics can help us to measure and predict student success using data relating to engagement, grades, retention, graduation and employability. But what products are out there to enable institutions to improve on the indicators of success, and to help visualise and analyse the […]