Week 2: Cases and Examples

Week 2: Cases and examples of learning analytics

Introduction:

Online learning is driving much of the interest in learning analytics, due to the data trail left as students interact with each other and with the learning management system. Many successful examples of learning analytics, however, come from traditional college/university programs and classrooms, as the readings this week indicate.

A significant difficulty faced by LA is the limited scope of data capture. As a result, available data, not necessarily important data, determines analytics approaches. More of the learning process is captured today than has been in the past (through LMS, student information systems, library use, tests/exams, and so on). Even then, much of the learning process is inaccessible to academics: social interactions between learners during group work, study habits of learners, note taking patterns, relevance of content to students interests, factors that motivate individuals students, etc.

While recognizing these weaknesses, numerous analytics case studies are available for researchers, administrators, and academics to consider as they plan institutional LA projects. This week we will review cases and consider their applicability to other institutions. It is evident from these cases that learning analytics are still at their early stages of development, currently importing practices from other fields (such as recommender systems).

Readings and videos:

Learning Activities:

1. Attend weekly weekly presentations (Feb 19 & 20): Live Sessions & Guest Speakers

2. Continue working on your analytics model Analytics: Logic and Structure

3. Download VUE or CMAP and start developing your concept map. More information here (including links for downloading software): Concept Map

4. Contribute to Week 2 Discussion Forum. In addition to personal reflections and experiences with analytics in your institutions, comment on the relevance or applicability of the case studies to your institution. Do these examples motivate you to develop or advocate for similar analytics projects at your institution? Do the benefits detailed by the authors of the case studies warranted the effort required to build analytics models?

Additional Readings:

The readings below are more academic and may require access through a university or library.

Govaerts, Sten; Verbert, Katrien; Duval, Erik. Evaluating the student activity meter: two case studies, ICWL 2011: The International Conference on Advances in Web-based Learning, Hong Kong, 8-10 December 2011, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Web-based Learning - ICWL 2011, volume 7048, pages 188-197, Springer
Santos Odriozola, Jose Luis; Govaerts, Sten; Verbert, Katrien; Duval, Erik. Goal-oriented visualizations of activity tracking: a case study with engineering students, LAK12: International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Vancouver, Canada, 29 April - 2 May 2012, ACM
Bakharia, A., & Dawson, S. (2011). SNAPP: a bird’s-eye view of temporal participant interaction. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (pp. 168–173). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2090116.2090144
Verpoorten, D., Westera, W., & Specht, M. (2011). Reflection amplifiers in online courses: a classification framework. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 22(2), 167–190. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/33033
Romero-Zaldivar, V.-A., Pardo, A., Burgos, D., & Delgado Kloos, C. (2012). Monitoring student progress using virtual appliances: A case study. Computers & Education, 58(4), 1058–1067. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.12.003
Dillenbourg, P., Zufferey, G., Alavi, H., Jermann, P., Do-lenh, S., Bonnard, Q., Cuendet, S., et al. (2011). Classroom Orchestration: The Third Circle of Usability. CSCL2011 Proceedings (Vol. I, pp. 510–517).