In discussions around the ethics and legal issues of learning analytics I’ve found the same issues cropping up again and again. Almost always they’ve already been covered somewhere in the growing collection of publications on learning analytics. Sometimes they’re expressed in different ways but boil down to the same underlying problem. The literature review of […]
A wide-ranging discussion took place in London last week to discuss the emerging Code of Practice for Learning Analytics. A new advisory group for the Code includes representatives from the National Union of Students, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Lancaster and Loughborough Universities, Bucks New University, The Open University, Croydon College and Jisc. A Code of Practice for Learning […]
It was evident from my visits to universities and colleges in the summer that there’s a lot of interest in learning analytics and an increasing amount of experimentation with predictive modelling and other uses of data about learners and learning. What was clear too was that people didn’t have a good picture about what was […]
Many applications for learning analytics have been proposed, are under development or are already being deployed by institutions. These range from prompting staff to intervene with students at risk of drop-out to attempting to understand whether some learning content or activity is effective. Much of this is about providing better information to staff about students and […]
Do institutions need to obtain consent from students before collecting and using data about their online learning activities? Should learners be allowed to opt out of having data collected about them? Could showing students predictions about their likelihood of academic success have a negative effect on their motivation and make them more likely to drop […]
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 […]