1. IN OPEN ONLINE EDUCATION
Infrastructure for Learning Analytics
Alan Berg
Co chair – SURF SiG LA,
Community Officer Apereo LAI
Program manager LA - UvA
2. There will be a digital divide
between Higher ED organizations with
data centralism and those without.
Those organizations with data
centralism will have a significant
competitive advantage related to Learning
analytics services.
3. OU UK
Are we on the wrong side of an emerging digital divide for researchers and
later practitioners?
Before 2018, we aim to become a world leading centre of learning
analytics research, whereby state-of-the-art evidence-based research leads to
advancements of the learning analytics field, transformed into successful
methods, approaches and commercial products. Furthermore, we need to
ensure that research is effectively translated into cost-effective
transformations of the core OU business programme. By developing micro-
level experiments in the Jennie Lee Research Laboratories and meso-
level interventions within the core business model (e.g., Student Experience
Project PVC LT) together with the two other research programmes within IET
(Innovative Pedagogy, Learning in an open world), we aim to become
the leading centre of excellence in learning analytics
as recognised by REF 2020.
4. •Standards
-xAPI / Caliper
-LTI
•Requirements and hackathons
-Look at all that duplication of functionality and potentially
relearning others lessons
•Retention systems: Open Academic Analytics Initiative
-Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML)
•Dashboards: Open Dashboard
•Broad community and policies– OLA (SoLAR, LACE, JISC,
Apereo LAI, SURF, UvA)
•Learn from formative examples: JISC national Freemium LA
Service
Building large scale systems
The recipe
5. ● Gathers student activity in a secure repository
● Standard protocol
● REST like service for writing and querying
● Can act as the glue for Learning Analytics
Projects
● Good introduction at:
http://tincanapi.com/overview/
What is the experience API
7. xAPI Benefits
● Decouples activity streams from specific software
(centralizes data)
● Standards approach
● Scalable - But {the LRS market needs to mature}
● Structured data - But {depends on what you send}
● Community
● Clean data for research
● Growing market enthusiasm
● Can work well with LTI dashboards
8. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
•Learning Tools Interoperability
•Stand alone application that appears inside LMS’s, portal’s etc
•Great for scalability, performance, migration, separation of
concerns
•Large list of compliant tools
•Uses a secret key to secure communication
•LMS passes context information
•Examples: UvAnalytics, Opendashboard
•Homepage: http://www.imsglobal.org/lti/index.html
9. Context Information
resource_link_id: is a key for the content.
context_id: is the key to the course.
user_id: is the key to the user in the PIWIK database.
roles: Is the set of roles the user has in the course.
lis_person_contact_email_primary: E-mail address of user as defined
in the Blackboard Database.
Full list of variables:
http://www.imsglobal.org/lti/ltiv2p0/uml/purl.imsglobal.org/vocab/lti/v2/variabl
e/index.html
10. Scalable dashboards using LTI
Learning
Record Store
All Other
enabled
Sakai CLE
Dashboard
Application
LTI
● Scalable
● Lazy coupling
● Has the potential to
work across
applications
11. IMSGlobal – Caliper
•A competing standard against xAPI, but does
more
•You can find the exact details here:
http://imsglobal.org/caliper/index.html
•Public release very near.
•Recommend keeping track
12. Hackathons and open dashboard
Requirements count
• Collecting requirements across hackathons
• Sponsored by SURF and UvA
- 2 days. 4 teams. Free to participate
• LAK15 Conference
- 2 days. 4 teams. Conference charge to participate
- http://lak15.solaresearch.org/hackathon
- https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/LAI/Learning+Analytics+Initiati
ve
- https://github.com/Apereo-Learning-Analytics-Initiative/
- Open dashboard
- Open LRS
• More hackathons to come
13. Open Learning Analytics
With learning analytics poised to become a mainstream technology, higher education leaders
from around the world came together following the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK)
2014 conference in Indianapolis, Indiana for an Open Learning Analytics (OLA) Summit.
European OLA summit Nov 2014 in Amsterdam (LACE, Apereo supporting)
• http://solaresearch.org/initiatives/ola/
• In progress
• Heavily influences emerging frameworks such as:
- Apereo Learning Analytics Initiative
- Jisc National Freemium LA infrastructure
22. xAPI + Open Badges
http://learninglocker.net/2014/03/03/tin-badges-or-open-cans-a-technology-tango/
Growing set of
examples
Editor's Notes
The emerging digital divide for Universities. Those with data centralism and those without.
Emerging technological solutions are putting pressure on Policy and practices.
The JISC infrastructure is forcing changes in policy.
Message: Infrastructure and Policy will be closely related
Practices and governance are both emerging.
Learning Locker Learning Record Store (LRS)
http://learninglocker.net/2014/03/03/tin-badges-or-open-cans-a-technology-tango/
“An xAPI statement essentially records an event related to learning. The big idea (I think) is to facilitate the effortless capture of learning events, regardless of learning system or environment. But lonely xAPI statements by themselves are potentially just a sea of meaningless event records . . . .
An open badge aims to recognise something, whether it be achievement, attendance or behaviour. But badges gained without authenticated evidence inside are potentially valueless.
Together, they provide a meaningful record of achievement, with an authenticated audit trail of activity. The granular statements that xAPI provides support the assessment process of deciding whether someone has achieved a particular badge – or not yet achieved it. Essentially this results in a mapping between the criteria stored in a badge and the activity stored in xAPI statements. This mapping can also be stored inside the badge itself when issued. . . .
ADL Design Group
We’ve put together a working group for the second round of the ADL’s Experience API design group to do exactly this. Our team, The Experience Badgers, will be working to deliver two key outcomes:
1. To create a prototype for issuing Open Badges based on a pre-specified set of criteria that are evidenced in xAPI statements (i.e. Data comes in, when the criteria is met, the badge is issued to the individual)
2. And to suggest a standard method by which Open Badges are identified in xAPI statements (i.e. what is the appropriate context description and method to describe an Open Badge being issued to a learner, such that 3rd party systems can always ‘detect’ when a statement refers to a badge and potentially always reach the badge assertion).”