Ian Dolphin - "It's Groundhog Day all over again - analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online" Jisc Digifest 2016. Slides with notes

1. Groundhog Day all over again?
Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Ian Dolphin, Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin@apereo.org / @iandolphin24

2. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
http://www.apereo.org
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The Apereo Foundation
Apereo
Little context about the organisation I represent - Apereo - US registered non-profit, membership organisation that acts as a meeting point for education to create and sustain open source software. We've been described as Apache for education. That's not exactly right, but it'll give you a rough idea.
We're an organisation of builders and pragmatists
With our partners in France represent a network of around 150 institutions worldwide
Software under our umbrella includes Sakai, Xerte, Opencast and a dozen or so other applications and tools

3. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Next Generation Digital Learning Environment
Another ugly acronym?
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https://www.educause.edu/library/resources/next-generation-digital-learning-environment-ngdle
Any ten minute view of the future power of digital for learning will be very partial. I want to focus on a discussion that has opened up in North America, and offer a perspective on how that might relate to developing work around learning analytics
Educause Learning Initiative organised a conversation with their community. Broad - dozens of institutions = look at what might lie beyond the VLE
Noted success of VLE. Adoption, use BUT also noted drawbacks
Inflexible. Course centred. Teacher centred.
Educause consultation elaborated key features for a future learning environment
Salient points -
Should be easier to integrate tools - perhaps discipline specific tools - with common standards
Accessibility designed in - not an afterthought
Support different forms of collaboration across and between institutions
Support services surfaced on a range of devices
Support analytics for advising - retention
Personalised experience
So why the title misquoting the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra?
Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (how many seen?)
I took part in the closing stages of that ELI conversation. it felt a little like Groundhog Day -We've been talking about some of these issues for years.
So it made me think - What's different?
»

4. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Scale of the Conversation
Smarter, lighter Specifications
Technology Maturity
Analytics
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» Scale of the conversation. Not lone voices in the blogosphere. Major institutional voices in higher and further ed.
» We're a lot better at workable and pragmatic common specs and standards. LTI out of IMS. Experience API from ADL.
» We've got a lot better at technology that can scale and support personalisation (social media - "Web 2.0 experience")
» We're starting to develop practical use of big data and analytics as the basis of rich personalisation

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Academic Analytics
Learner Analytics
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» Let's unpick analytics a little
» Perhaps appropriate to make a distinction here - and this comes from some of our US colleagues
» Academic analytics - spotlighting system wide or organisational intelligence
» Learner analytics - actionable data about individual learners. The basis of an individual intervention

6. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Continuum
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Prediction for
Retention intervention
Prediction for
Learning pathways
» Worth exploring future potential here
» Current use of learner analytics - intervention, typically around retention of an "at risk" student
» Evidence from early efforts that this is having impact. U.K. Case studies in recent "Clicks to Bricks" report. Michael Webbs slides from yesterday's session with US examples
» Future - potential for rich personalisation - sequencing of tools and content. Reasonable to suppose early efforts around remediation. That might stretch in the future to what Phil Richards described yesterday as deep understanding of eLearning
» Will this replace an educator? No. But it will meaningfully augment and extend the systems we use to support learning

7. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Platform, rather than application
Jisc service uses Apereo components
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https://www.apereo.org/communities/learning-analytics-initiative
Several approaches to learner analytics
Application add-on - typically to SIS or VLE
We're building a component based platform - learner record store, etc
More extensible, more flexible. Adopters have choices
Easier to extend, and integrate further data sources. And we should note the current pieces that are difficult to integrate within many of our institutions - in particular data in library systems
Critically - platform lets us - eventually - experiment towards those future uses more readily.
Several elements of the Apereo platform are being integrated into the developing JISC service

8. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Organisational Readiness
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» Quite right that the tone was set in yesterday's introduction about humanising technology
» Technology is only one element of what we need to explore effective use of learner analytics
» Organisational readiness involves many more non-technical than technical elements
» First among those - Clearly articulated ethical framework as the basis for informed consent. Jisc work has already helped inform conversations not only in the UK, but in the US, France and the Netherlands

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http://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A64739
Society for Learning Analytics Research institutional Maturity framework - valuable guide of you're starting down this path.
We partner with SoLAR and Jisc because it makes sense to pool complimentary efforts
And those conversations help drive the development of our software. Not just in terms of analytics data output, or of our developing analytics platform, but of the eventual use of the analysis of that data to better shape that future learning environment.
So you won't wake up ten years hence and discover it's still Groundhog Day, but that the next generation digital learning environment the community are sketching out becomes a reality.

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» And by way of a shameless plug for our colleagues in SoLAR, if you'd like a closer look at some of the potential futures of this work - check out the Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference in Edinburgh in April

11. Groundhog Day all over again? Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Groundhog Day all over again?
Analytics and the Next Generation of Learning Online
Ian Dolphin
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