Just kicking off, a project funded by Australian OLT which I’ve long been dreaming about under the heading of Social Learning Analytics [1-2], and now brought to life by Kirsty Kitto and her team at QUT, in collaboration with Mandy Lupton who is developing the concept of teaching+learning in the wild.
The point of departure is their Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) Toolkit:
[1] Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012). Social Learning Analytics: Five Approaches. In: 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 29 Apr – 02 May 2012, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, pp. 23–33. Open Access Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32910 [2] Buckingham Shum, S., & Ferguson, R. (2012). Social Learning Analytics. Educational Technology & Society, 15 (3), 3–26. Open Access Eprint: http://www.ifets.info/journals/15_3/2.pdf“The CLA toolkit helps students and teachers to harvest data about their activities in standard social media environments, and then provide immediate feedback and reports. It is currently in development, but the basic design is sketched out below:
The release of the Experience API (xAPI) makes it possible to capture student behaviour in a highly flexible manner and send it to a Learning Record Store (LRS) for immediate or later analysis. We currently have tools in development that will interface with the API’s of
- Google+
- StackExchange
- Google Docs
More details can be found in this paper:
- K. Kitto, S. Cross, Z. Waters & M. Lupton. Learning Analytics beyond the LMS: the Connected Learning Analytics Toolkit. Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK’15), In Press, ACM.
And if you want to go and check out the source code, then it is available on GitHub.
This project has now been funded by the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The Proposal that we submitted can be found here if you would like more details.”
Categories:CIC News, Future of HigherEd, Projects, Software
Tags:learning analytics, social learning