So we’ve been asked to imagine that the management team’s vision of an educational institution is that, in the future, they will be able to claim on their website that ‘learning and teaching at this institution are supported by learning analytics’. However, since the management team is not sure what would be involved in implementing a change to support this statement, they cannot clearly state what changes and developments that might be required in order to support this claim.
Student Community
The student body including undergraduate and postgraduate bodies would need to know feel secure that they analytics were solely being used to support their learning and that they were not being prejudiced against because of the analytics. Privacy issues are of a major concern.
Teacher Community & Pedagogic Resource Community
Educators and others involved in pedagogic practice or design, would need to be able to know what analytics are, how they are aligned with learning design, how they can be implemented and privacy concerns etc addressed, how they can be monitored and assessed, and finally how they can be used effectively to enhance teaching/learning. This group is perhaps the one that would be the hardest to convince and/or train up – essentially they need to be convinced that the learning curve and effort will more than pay off what they are currently doing.
Technical Communities & Technical content
Working with the teaching and pedagogic practices that can gather the data, protice privacy and yet be easily understood by both educators and students alike. The hardest part is perhaps to gather the data in a way that is encrypted, but is still of utility to the individual student.
Ecology of Practices
Essentially changing the mindset of the whole institution, including the Vice Chancellor, or CEO of an institution that the learning analystics are an intergral part of the learning ecology, not just an interesting ‘technical experiment’. Some sort of overview body might be required to ensure that the analystics are fulfiling their function and may need to be re-evaluated in light of new technical developments in the technology enhance learning (TEL) arena. This is probaly the ulimate conceptual space in which learning analytics will either fail or succeed.
I think the wording is adequate.
Reference to the Headings above from the report:
Scanlon, E. et al. (2013) Beyond Prototypes: Enabling Innovation in Technology-enhanced Learning. (Online). Available at http://beyondprototypes.com/ (Accessed 3rd August 2016).