If not already being used, then the advise would be to use learning analytics in the Open Education block of the H817 course. It appears in this Block 2 of the H817 programme (similarly for Block 1 & 4 - this current Block) that the main educational pedagogy of the course is to access material and then to comment on the material and hopefully engage in a discussion about those comments with other members of the tutorial group.
Checkpoint Analytics: can be used to simply see if students have accessed the suggested resources that are required in order to make the commentary.
Process Analytics: to be used to figure out who is posting a comment and perhaps as importantly, who is commenting on those comments.
However, what is not clear (to me) is what the consequences of these learning analytics should/could be. Myself for example, I’ve been normally behind (according to the time line) but have not been contacted to say ‘is everything ok?’ or ‘are you joining us?’. Of course that would have been easily answered (‘yes’ & ‘yes’) and just because there is no interaction on the discussion boards this does not mean that learning is not occurring.
Learning Analytics and the LMS of a Learning Institution
This seems to be bring up a fundamental issue with learning analytics and that is that it seems to me that they currently require students to be using the LMS of the learning institution (OU’s Moodle in H817). I personally find that the Moodle environment to be a design nightmare and try to spend as much time out of it as possible. Most web designers have figured out that the more a user has to ‘click’ to access information, or contribute to information, the less likely they are to do so. There are a number of members of the tutorial group (myself included) that host their own blogs but it’s nigh impossible to ‘cut’ that blog into the formal H817 tutorial discussion boards (or at least it’s not easy and I have not found a way yet). Thus it takes extra effort to comment on the blogs of others AND of course for others to comment on mine. With 5 weeks to go before the end of the course, I haven’t had a single comment on this blog and there are (including this one) 32 postings and I’ve cut the link into I think all of them or almost all of them on the discussion board.
This sounds like a complaint, or a whinge. Of course I might not have that much to comment on (heh heh) but that is not my point.
My point is that if learning analytics requires measurement of interaction and access to each other, then for the moment it seems as if it can only work by buying into the LMS of the institution.