The Learning Analytics field is now a teenager, having launched in 2011. With the explosive rise of GenAI, this seemed a good moment for the community to reflect on where we need to go. CIC’s Kirsty Kitto co-chaired a whole day workshop to wrangle this…
Assoc. Prof. Kirsty Kitto co-led a stimulating international workshop entitled, What are the Grand Challenges of Learning Analytics? as part of the International Conference on Learning Analytics. The mission:
In line with the conference theme, this workshop will “expand the horizons” of Learning Analytics (LA) by bringing together researchers and practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds to create a community-accepted list of grand challenges. It will work towards finding common elements in various existing research programs and mapping out the new research avenues that are deemed most interesting by the community. This will help the LA community to point to well established “blue skies” requiring more work when applying for funding and large grants. It will also support more junior researchers in seeing the bigger picture when plotting out their research trajectory.
The workshop invited CIC’s Ben Hicks and Simon Buckingham Shum as participants, joining an eclectic mix of colleagues representing the community’s diverse disciplines and participants’ different career stages. The outcomes were shared with the wider community via a poster, and a conference plenary session on the closing day. This included an overview of the challenge that had been top voted in a workshop poll, which was pitched by Simon Buckingham Shum:
Learning in the age of global polycrisis: implications for learning analytics and artificial intelligence
Humanity is now locked into pathways which entail unavoidable disruption due to the climate crisis. Earth systems and ecosystems are inextricably tied to human systems, whose interactions exacerbate conditions for human and planetary wellbeing, a crisis of crises that have been termed “the polycrisis”. It seems plausible that this has profound implications for civic and professional learning, including the environmental conditions under which learning will happen, and the kinds of learning most urgently needed. This helps clarify the implications for technologies designed to advance such learning, Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence being of particular interest.
The workshop chairs are now preparing a special issue of the Journal of Learning Analytics. Watch this space!
