Shareables

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review"

Next step in online education: learning analytics and open online education. Like Facebook, you give the tools and content for free, and track what students do, how they perform, and sell that information (or people directly) to interested 3rd parties.

Technology will define where online education goes next. All those millions of students clicking online can have their progress tracked, logged, studied, and probably influenced, too. Talk to Khan or anyone behind the MOOCs (which largely sprang from university departments interested in computer intelligence) and they’ll all say their eventual goal isn’t to stream videos but to perfect education through the scientific use of data. Just imagine, they say, software that maps an individual’s knowledge and offers a lesson plan unique to him or her.

Back to behaviorism? #LAK12

“… The students’ feelings and attitudes, which are hugely important to the educational process, cannot be measured by clicks at all.”

http://libraryanalytics.blogspot.com/2012/02/behaviorism.html

My reply:

Clicks, ok, but fortunately ‘social learners’ do more than clicking: they write, comment, repost, blog, etc. There are many different methods and approaches that can interpret data in a more meaningful way (still in dev), and they could in principle detect emotions. Taking into account future developments in sensor networks and smart computing, I think these possibilities will only increase in the future.

An example of some good research into semantic analysis of the social web on my university: http://wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/imreal/u-sem/

Innovation and analytics in farming

Very interesting recording from yesterday’s session on data and analytics in agriculture is now available. Chris Perry - a potato farmer - detailed how they use analytics to transform their farming operation, moving to “biomimicry” (following the natural biological process) and reducing the impact of chemicals on farming.

From the Learning Analytics Course 2012 - http://lak12.wikispaces.com/

What are Learning Analytics?

George Siemens conception of Learning Analytics: so it is all aimed at personalization and adaptation:

For example, an integrated learning system should be able to track my physical and online interactions, analyze my skills and competencies, and then compare my life-long skills against a discipline or field of knowledge (this comparison will be possible because a discipline will utilize intelligent/semantic/linked data to define its knowledge). Then, the learning system should inform me that I am “64% to a achieving a phd in psychology, 92% to achieving a masters in science, 100% to achieving a certificate in online learning” and so on.

Or, what I would like to see: 82% suitable to solve that (semantically annotated) problem, 90% able to assist in that project. So, integrated in my opinion means making the connection with the professional context.

Here George’s graphical representation:

Process of Learning Analytics

Learning analytics: open learning environments

I asked this question on the LAK11 forum:

… It regards the fact that learning is not constrained to only the school or university: this is not sustainable or realistic. People interact on forums and other learning environments, such as Cramster, StackOverflow, Quora, Wikipedia, Hypios, etc. Isn’t it time that institutions go and start hosting these kinds of environments and develop standards for measuring learning activity? I think that if this is the case, these environments need to be more open than a traditional LMS, allowing anyone to add anyone (institutions have less control). What kind of analytics do we need to control quality of content and assessment of learning activities?

scope.bccampus.ca