Last week a group of KMI and OU colleagues attended the 3rd International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK13) in Leuven, Belgium. The conference theme this year was ‘Dialectics in Learning Analytics’ with three core facets: The Middle Space – in which learning, and analytics intersect Productive Multivocality – encouraging communities to come together…
With KMi’s support, Compendium’s user and developer community have self-organised to take its future software development forward. BACKGROUND: The OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and Verizon co-founded the Compendium Institute, and in 2002 KMi became the software development hub, releasing Compendium as a freely distributed application, funded by external research grants, and resulting in a…
I was recently in Edinburgh where I ran a hands-on workshop for the OU in Scotland team led by Ronald Macintyre, who have a project fnuded by the Scottish Government on how Scottish higher education institutions are engaged with workplace learning. The OUiS team will be co-designing an Evidence Hub to help them map the…
UNESCO’s Institute for Information Technologies in Education publishes Policy Briefs with recommendations for senior decision makers. KMi has provided the latest briefing, on Learning Analytics. Summary: Learning Analytics is a rapidly growing research field and commercial , with potentially disruptive potential. While educationalresearchers have for many years used computational techniques toanalyse learner data, generate visualizations of…
Learning Analytics embody assessment regimes: which ones do we need for the future of learning? The replay from my keynote address to the Expanding Horizons 2020 conference at Macquarie University is now up. I gave an overview of how the field is developing at macro, meso and micro scales, and then later on make a…
As the field of Learning Analytics develops, there is an urgent need to equip a new generation of educational researchers and data scientists. SoLAR Storm is an online research lab to connect PhD students and supervisors globally. A widely cited report by McKinsey Global Institute identifies a huge global skills gap: people who can combine…
We’ve just announced what should be a field-defining event for Learning Analytics: a summer institute bringing together 100 participants at Stanford University in July 2013, with satellite Institutes running globally. Learning Analytics as both a research topic and emerging marketplace has recently garnered the attention of faculty, educational researchers and administrators, policy makers, data scientists…
I was at Stanford University recently as a member of the Big Educational Data Science affinity group, charged with roadmapping the field of Learning Analytics. Convened by Prof. Roy Pea, and funded by the Gates Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, this group comprises a great mix of academics, education entrepreneurs, dot-coms, data science experts and technologists. A…
As part of our Collective Intelligence R&D, for the last few months we’ve been developing the concept of an Evidence Hub, learning user experience lessons from the first example we developed for the Hewlett Foundation on the Open Learning Network project, generifying the shell into one that can be customized for the different communities who…
The EnquiryBlogger project has just released a suite of plugins turning WordPress into a social learning journal with learning analytics. WordPress is the world’s most popular open source content management system and blogging platform. EnquiryBlogger plugins add Dispositional and Enquiry-Based Learning Analytics. EnquiryBlogger is a collaboration between the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (Simon Buckingham…
