My colleague at LSBM Karen Stepanyan, and I spent the week (April 25-29) at LAK 16 in Edinburgh. Also taking in the ending Key note for Learning@Scale. Here I record a few notes under three headers, and re-present slides that resonated with me. As part of the week I participated in these workshops:
- Learning Analytics Across Physical and Digital Spaces – Cross-LAK (proceedings)
- LAL Workshop: Learning Analytics for Learners – LAL (proceedings)
Note 1:
Analytics on a live performance (presenting slides in this case)
Somebody at a music college gave me some feedback on their institutions progress with the Canvas LMS. I asked them what might be of interest at LAK16, and they responded: the analytics of performance. Being a musician of sorts myself this was interesting. This paper from Cross-LAK was the closest I encountered to the analytics of a performance: Towards a distributed framework to analyze multimodal data
Vanessa Echeverria, Federico Domínguez and Katherine Chiluiza
Abstract: Data synchronization gathered from multiple sensors and its corresponding reliable data analysis has become a difficult challenge for scalable multimodal learning systems. To tackle this particular issue, we developed a distributed framework to decouple the capture task from the analysis task through nodes across a publish/subscription server…
What was most of interest to me: To see a system with automatic analysis and reporting on the quality of a persons “presentation” or “performance” – based on analysis of audio and video streams and textural analysis of presentation slides.
Note 2:
Metacognition in learning and Experience Sampling Apps @Scale
These notes are not about one paper, but about what a number of presentations/papers made me wonder. In short: why am I not aware of an Apps/projects working at scale (~thousands of schools), to help learners, and gather data related to meta-cognition (and maybe the learners emotions as well) – perhaps using an experience sampling method (ESM)? After all, governments around the world spend a considerable amount of money on educating young people, and it is often less effective than hoped. This seems like a great albeit difficult project to increase the usefulness of Learning Analytics.
This was a short conversation on twitter related to the thought above. Prompted in part by discussions at the LAL workshop, this tweet and the App described by Carrie Demmans in her short paper “English Language Learner Experiences of Formal and Informal Learning Environments” … Keywords: ubiquitous learning, experience sampling methodology, informal learning, formal learning, language learning, English language learner, communication, affect, analytics. Youtube video of presentation
Also I have always thought one of the values of being introduced to the concept of ‘Preferred Learning styles’ was it gets us thinking about how we learn, and the most efficient ways of learning for our selves – meta-cognition. However “There presently is no empirical justification for tailoring instruction to student’s supposedly different learning styles”. This is a slide from Prof. dr. Paul A. Kirschner’s keynote lecture
…So this is what got me thinking about Metacognition in learning, and developing Experience Sampling Apps @Scale
Note 3:
New Forms of Assessment
A Dispatch from the Psychometric Front by Professor Robert J. Mislevy. This was another interesting lecture…Examples applications using new forms of assessment discussed are shown in this slide below: SimCityEDU; Packet Tracer – Cisco Networking Academy….
Useful resources
Doug Clow’s Live blogs: https://dougclow.org/lak16-liveblogs/
Posts from an educational technologist & family members 