Learning-Analytics

Dashboards in educational contexts are usually comprised of visualizations of educational data. For example, dashboards inside the LMS are often comprised of line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts of data like logins and quiz scores. The primary goal of educational dashboard design is, ostensibly, for them to be “actionable.” In other words, a teacher, student, or administrator should be able to take an action after spending time interpreting a dashboard. For that to be possible, three questions must be answered in the affirmative. ...

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Below I’m cross-posting two short pieces on this topic I recently published on Lumen’s site (here and here). Improvement in post secondary education will require converting teaching from a solo sport to a community-based research activity. (Herbert A. Simon, 1986) The faculty Lumen work with carry an enormous workload. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. Some have committee assignments and additional service responsibilities. Some drive across town several times per day as they try to string adjunct appointments at three institutions together into a career that pays the rent. All of our faculty have expertise in their discipline. Few have formal training in teaching or learning. ...

I recently needed to quickly create a map of higher education institutions Lumen is working with, and consequently needed LAT and LONG info for dozens of schools. Rather than do that all by hand, I created this little recipe for automatically retrieving coordinates given a school’s name using the Google Maps API and Google Spreadsheets. Here’s a demonstration of the recipe using a list of all the higher education institutions where I’ve taught: ...

Great news for Tidewater Community College, one of Lumen Learning’s first partner schools: Tidewater Community College’s textbook-free degree in business, which was launched as a pilot program with the Fall 2013 semester, is a finalist for a national Bellwether Award, given annually by the Community College Futures Assembly. Among more than 400 applicants in three categories, TCC was selected as one of 10 finalists in the “instructional programs and services” category. All finalists will present their programs Jan. 27 at the Community College Futures Assembly in Orlando, Fla., and winners will be announced the next day at the group’s annual meeting. ...

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way - and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day. We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins: ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

Cable Green sent a frustrated email today to the Educause Openness Constituent Group. Here’s the key point: The Babson Survey Research Group has released a new report: Growing the Curriculum: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education. This sentence is of particular concern to me: “One concept very important to many in the OER field was rarely mentioned at all – licensing terms such as creative commons that permit free use or re-purposing by others.” ...

Here are the things that stood out to me most during the three day meeting. Sorry for the brain dump format. Moorseville, NC moved graduation rates 68% to 90% since the move to devices and all digital content Two professional development release days PER MONTH for faculty to skill up on digital and using data Small group differentiated instruction, almost no whole-class instruction Superintendent visits every classroom in the district multiple times each year, primarily to say thank you to the teachers. Funding model - $1 / day / student ($200/year) pays for devices and content. Average cost for online content was $35/student across all subjects. ...

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the ETS Future of Assessment internal conference today. The slides are available at slideshare, but here are the three main points from my talk today. “Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) - this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI. ...