Analytics Project

The first two weeks of LAK13 situate learning analytics as a field and its relation to educational data mining and related fields. The Analytics: Logic and Structure assignment introduces the importance of clear goals and visions with analytics activities. 

In week 3, analytics tools and techniques will be presented. We are offering three special interest groups for analytics:

• Tableau Software
• R
• Evidence Hub

Information on downloading the software and creating accounts is provided below. Once you have downloaded Rstudio (or set up your account on cRunch), or downloaded Tableau, or signed up with the Evidence Hub, you will return to your Logic and Structure assignment and begin interacting with data in order to address your questions. Sample data sets will be made available. Tutorials and discussion forum support will provided.

Tableau Information Visualization (provided by Tableau Software)

Licenses for Tableau Software have been arranged for the duration of the course (active until April 20). Follow these details to download:

1. Landing Page: Tableau for Teaching MOOC Page Links to an external site.
2. Desktop Key: TDJ2-BFF2-F6F0-B9EA-4B99                                                                      
3. Instructions: Click on the link above and fill out the form on the right hand side of the page. Under "Job Title", mark Student; and under "Organization", please input the name of your institution.
4. View Tableau tutorials here Links to an external site. (click on demand tab)

R Statistical Analysis and Visualization: Calc a little, learn a lot (Fridolin Wild)

Open Source communities have started to invest heavily into the development of learning analytics. One particularly rewarding example of that is the R community, which is centred in on statistics and exploratory data programming.

Within this assignment, we will be taking a closer look on R and we will be using cRunch and Rstudio for it. cRunch is both infrastructure and community platform for computationally-intense learning analytics, supporting researchers in investigating big data generated in the co-construction of knowledge. cRunch runs a web-based, exploratory data mash-up environment for R (Rstudio, also available as desktop software) and provides sharing facilities for data, scripts, and reports.

We will learn:

- The language basics of R
- To use R studio
- To predict the score of a student essay (using textmining technologies)
- To measure the community structure of a discussion board (using social network analysis)
- ... and more!

You should know basics about scripting in any other programming language and you should be familiar with simple data analysis as created with basic Excel knowledge.

The activities for this assignment:

1. View the introductory video Links to an external site.
2. Download Rstudio from here Links to an external site. or register an account with cRunch (fill in the form here Links to an external site. and give us a week to register you)
3. Work through the tutorials Links to an external site..
4. Attend the discussion session on Collaborate for an overview, an introduction, and the chance to discuss your analytics endeavour in R (details to follow)
5. Over the week (or next): create your own analytics (you can bring your own data ;-)

Learning Analytics Evidence Hub (Simon Buckingham Shum)

The SoLAR Learning Analytics Evidence Hub is a collective intelligence platform for mapping ideas, evidence and communities, generating a range of analytics designed to provoke reflection.

In this course, the Evidence Hub might play a number of roles, depending on how you use it:

1. a way to crowdsource a geo-map of who is on the course — but also the wider LAK community of people, organizations and projects.
2. a way to map the issues, claims, solutions, +/– evidence and resources you encounter in the course: a sort of "MOOC dashboard" and collectively generated set of concept maps, to help make sense of the material.
3. an option for your analytics project which does not require quantitative data like R and Tableau, but rather, invites you to use the prototype web platform to generate evidence of structured knowledge-building, and reflect on the user experience, tools and analytics reports.

Learn more: Evidence Hub tutorial Links to an external site....