Invitation to a Learning Analytics Online Consultation Event

Monday 8 December, 6pm UK time, Collaborate

OR

Wednesday 10 December, 9am UK time, Collaborate

Information Services (IS) here at the University is exploring ways of making available to students, some data about their activity inside the central Virtual Learning Environments Learn and Moodle. IS are especially interested in ensuring that the data presented is useful for students, as feedback on their activity in the context of their peers and the particular course requirements. You can see some more information about these projects at http://edin.ac/11BrGAF

Wilma Alexander (who some of you may know from Course Design) and some of her colleagues and the Digital Education team would like to invite all students on the MSc Digital Education to participate in a user study based on their work so far, through an online discussion session using Collaborate.

Both our VLE systems have to hold some data about activity as part of the system functionality, but in Moodle very little is systematically available to staff, and even less to students. IS have set up some plug-in tools which extract selected activity data, and this user study session (repeated twice, at the times listed above) will be focused around exploring anonymised visualisations from these tools, and discussing some of the following questions:

  • What might these visualisations convey to individuals about their performance and engagement on courses?
  • What impact might having accesss to such visualisations have on student behaviour? Should institutions collect and share this information with students? Should they use it to do other things, such as model student behaviour, or feed into wider activity analysis including e.g. library activity and demographic data?

If you are interested in this topic and are able to participate in one of the online sessions, please email Wilma Alexander from the Technology Enhanced Learning team – wilma.alexander@ed.ac.uk – to sign up.