Explanation

The easiest way to start thinking about learning analytics is to draw a comparison with what happens in retail. Big chain stores around the world are getting really good at recommending products to consumers. One in particular done some incredible stuff around this — they know that if a woman of a certain age starts buying unscented lotion, a bigger handbag and multivitamins, there’s an extremely high likelihood that she’s pregnant, and would like more reviews and recommendations related to maternity products and babies. Now you might think that this is about moving baby products onto consumers, but, if you think about the fact that one of our goals is to get the perfect, most engaging learning opportunity in front of a student at just the right moment, this kind of big data analysis, or learning analytics, becomes very powerful.

Let me give you another example: Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought…’, or their ‘recommendations for you…’ section is basically learning analytics. This kind of thinking has been brought into education to help raise literacy levels. The New Zealand library management and cataloguing software Koha has analytics built into it: if a student rates a book 5 stars, the software is able to look across all borrowers and say ‘other people who rated these books 5 stars also rated this book 5 stars — would you like to read it? We’ll reserve it and text you when it’s available.’ You can choose to limit your analytics to you or your school only, or vastly increase the accuracy of your predictions by looking across all other users who have rated items.

Impact

Undoubtedly, the crucial impact from learning analytics is our ability to offer Increasingly personalised, meaningful, engaging learning experiences for students. To track their progress, get early intervention information as soon as possible, and to make informed decisions about strategies that are most likely to make a difference for that student.

The other crucial impact of learning analytics is the opportunity it gives us to strengthen partnerships between school, the student, and parents and whanau. Becuase if we’ve got this wonderful data about a student’s progress through learning, why would we keep it to ourselves — what a great way to align the support offered to students at school and at home than to be completely transparent and invitational in the way we arrange learning?

So what? — The implications

We need to ask what data we’re gathering about our students and their progress through learning. If we’re completing tasks in a range of different online spaces, how do we bring all of that disparate data about a learner and make it whole again — make a complete picture of this child.

Another implication for us is the challenge to use that data once it’s gathered. There’s a great saying about data: it needs to be useful and used. It must be relevant, reliable and meaningful, but it’s pointless to gather data if we’re going to use it. What are your teaching as inquiry processes like in your school? How well is data used when making decisions about what needs to be learnt next and how students might best learn it? Are you drawing on the rich data you have about your students?

Some of the ethical implications for us centre around data sovereignty and privacy, the real power of learning analytics is unlocked when you’re able to work with large data sets — which means sharing data across schools. How are you going to ensure you deal fairly with students and other schools when sharing data? If you’re contributing to national-level data collection, have you thought through the implication around who has access to it, how student rights are managed?

If we can start to make use of learning analytics to get the right learning activity into those student’s hands, and maximise the engagement and motivation they have for that learning activity, we’ve got a really powerful model for personalising learning for every student.

Challenges

• What data are we gathering in our schools?
• How is it being stored and managed?
• Who has access to it?
• How is it being used to inform what is happening at school level?
• How is it contributing to national-level data collection to inform strategic decisions around resourcing etc.?

Examples and links:

• University of Bristol: Learning analytics and technology enhanced assessment PDF
• Educause Library: Learning Analytics
• DML Central: Big Data

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2014 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends (CORE website)

Ten Trend 2 – Living in the Digital Now from EDtalks on Vimeo.

The current digital revolution is probably one of the largest transformations to ever have taken place in human history. We’re all facing the challenge of living in the digital now and it only takes a quick look at the media to see that ideas of participation, identity, democracy, formal and informal networks are really being challenged. Where traditionally we might have looked to institutions of long standing or to well-established experts to solve problems for us, increasingly now we're sourcing information online, we're curating it, we're finding solutions, we're doing things digitally.

Drivers

The growth in technologies that allow people from around the globe to communicate and collaborate together have created a situation whereby previously disparate cultures have come together and new cultures have emerged. We’ve got a pretty well established set of principles, rules, understandings for what it means to be a really positive member of a community. What we don't have because it's been happening relatively quickly and recently, is the same set of understandings, rights, and responsibilities for living in the digital now. And so one of the things that we need to really do is work with our students to develop those expectations, those understandings.

Impact

Take for example EdChat NZ, which is something that runs once a week on Thursdays. People from all around the country come together and using the Twitter hashtag #EdChatNZ they discuss a particular topic. You ask questions, you provide opinions, you link to articles and research, you make opportunities for other people to be involved and to come in, and, really, the teachers that are involved in it model the kind of digital citizenship that we're looking for from our students when they are living in the digital now.

Another challenge that living in the digital now presents us with is centred on ownership and copyright. Traditionally, one person, or a couple of people, have created a piece of work. Now collaborative documents or file sharing tools mean that not only can more than one person work on a resource, but literally hundreds or thousands of people can work on it. So traditional notions of ownership begin to be challenged. We’ve seen the emergence of things like Creative Commons licenses emerge as a way for people to navigate around the tricky area of ownership, and as a tool to encourage others to edit, add to and build upon their work.

Implications

These new worlds are tricky for educators to navigate because, while we want to make use of these tools and opportunities, we want to do it in a way that ensures our students are safe, affirmed, and guided through the development of skills required to be good members of their communities. Some schools are involving the students in the process. So, instead of just having a digital citizenship lesson once a year, they are actually helping the students to identify what their own needs are in the digital world, and then using inquiry learning to help students to build resources, help videos, tutorials, and posters that other students can use to navigate through the digital world.

So you can see that a lot of parts of our culture, democracy, identity, leadership, the way that we work with others, are being challenged by living in the digital now. The only thing that's really clear is that in order to successfully navigate through these challenges, we're going to have to walk alongside our students and communities and be learners alongside them.

Challenges

• How well do our schools and classrooms (both physically and in terms of the programmes and behaviours) model and reflect the ‘digital now’ that is the experience of students and staff outside of school?
• Are you regularly reviewing what learners have access to and are using at home and in the community?
• How is this then reflected in your curriculum and pedagogy?
• What is the range of literacies we need to be considering? Cultural literacies? Maori literacy digitally? Pasifika literacies digitally? Digital and media literacy as well as technological literacies?

Examples and links:

• TEDtalk: Abha Dawesar: Life in the “digital now”
• Ako Aotearoa: Digital Information Literacy: what is it and how do you get it?
• #edchat
• Mix & Mash
• Netsafe: owls

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2014 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends (CORE website)

The old way and the new

Back in the bad old days, with limited transportation and communication, it was difficult to learn something if you were not physically near someone who could teach you. If I was a farmer, and I wanted to learn more about bookkeeping, but there wasn’t a bookkeeper in my village, I was plum out of luck. In order to counter this, the design of schools was centred on physical proximity. What we did was put a bunch of people who knew about stuff into one building, and we sent the children to that building in the hope that they would learn from those clever people. This design served us really well for a long time, but, as technology has improved, we now find ourselves in quite a different world. It’s a world of ubiquitous learning, where learning is available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, almost anywhere in the world.

Knowledge has become more available

As Tony Wagner says, ‘Knowledge is now a commodity; it’s free, like water or air.’ So, the system we built, that centred around efficiently moving information from one person’s head to another, where one person stood at the front of a room talking, and 50 people sat facing them, listening, writing it down, and trying to memorise that knowledge, needs to change. But, let’s be clear, knowing things will always be important. There will never be a time when ignorance will be an asset. Increasingly, the world values not simply the knowing of things, but what you can do with the things you know.

So, things like relatively low-cost computing devices, wireless internet, and 3 and 4G networks mean that we can overcome the tyranny of time and place. We no longer need to be in the same room as an expert, at a time convenient to both of us, for me to be able to learn from that expert. Think of something like the thousands of guitar tutorials on YouTube. If I want to learn from the best, I don’t need to travel to wherever they live, I just need a guitar and an internet connection. Even better, I can rewind that learning as many times as I need in order to go at my own pace, not the pace of most people in my class.

The challenge to schools

Open the doors to this new way of learning

The challenge to schools is two-fold: open up our doors to bring the ubiquitous learning that exists out there inside our schools, and arrange what we do in our schools so students have access to what’s out there. One of the most exciting things about ubiquitous learning is the fact that we can now put learning back where it belongs: out in the community, next to the people who want it.

Let me give you an example. If I were walking to school and I notice that the river beside me is flooded and a different colour, in the bad old days I would have to find an expert and ask her what was going on. In a world of ubiquitous learning, if I’ve got a device and a 3G connection: I can pull up a Google Earth view of the landscape, see that the river actually drains from the foothills of the local mountain range, overlay that with data from the Metservice to find that there has been a weather system carrying a lot of rain from the west over the last few days, then search for a YouTube video to learn more about erosion and sedimentation in rivers. All this in the landscape while following an authentic question of my own asking.

How will we spend our time in the classroom?

The other part of ubiquitous learning that is a challenge for schools is this: If we have traditionally spent a lot of time lining students up in rows and having them face the front, but now no longer need to do that in order to get knowledge out to them, what do we do with that time? Does ubiquitous learning mean that we can offer an increasingly personalised pathway through learning for each individual? Does it mean that the teacher’s role becomes more of an activator than a facilitator, that we need to be building the dispositions of lifelong learning rather than ensuring the learning takes place? If the answer to these questions is yes, then we need to radically re-think how we arrange learning in schools.

And if we don’t, we run the risk of holding on to a lot of practices from the bad old days.

Drivers for this trend

Social:

• Social media
• always on, always connected

Technology

• mobile technologies
• cloud computing
• online services
• UFB access
• wireless

Educational

• Learning works best in the right context and the right time. Ubiquity helps learning be right there.

Implications

• Is your school network prepared to accommodate the influx of student-owned mobile devices being connected?
• How would you describe the concept of “the cloud” to your staff or board of trustees?
• How could your school make effective use of ‘cloud-based’ applications and services for students and staff?
• Are your ‘home learning’ and ‘school learning’ experiences as rich and as deep as each other?

Examples and Links:

Cloud computing:

• What is cloud computing?

Mobile devices:

• 21 Reasons To Use Tablets In The 21st Century Classroom

Cloud apps:

• Google Docs
• Microsoft Office 365
• Dropbox.com

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2013 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends

Ten Trends 2013: The Smart Web from EDtalks on Vimeo.

Drivers for this trend:

• Social: Internet-capable consumer appliances, geo-location devices
• Technology: RFID technologies
• Educational: Convergence of internet-enabled devices in the classroom

The Smart Web

Has your fridge tweeted lately?

It might sound a bit funny, but shortly, not only your fridge, but most of your household appliances, your car, and even your house will be connected to the internet and part of what we call ‘the smart web’. The smart web is the name given to the developing trend to have all electronic devices connected to the internet in order to communicate and send and receive data. At a simple level, all new cars these days have computers in them. They monitor fuel consumption, check that the engine’s working properly, and warn you if there is a problem. Well that car spends its evenings in your garage, which is probably covered by your wireless network. The smart web means that your car can cut out the middleman and connect directly to your mechanic’s computer system to let it know how everything’s tracking for the coming service. It might let them know that there is only an oil change required, or that two new tyres are needed, so you better order them.

Smart shopping

You can do the same with fridges and the smart web: when you finish an item from the fridge, scan the barcode using the scanner on the door, and the fridge will add it to your online shopping list, which you can then login to, adjust, and complete the order for pickup or delivery. Saves time, and means your order is personalised to exactly what you need.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID):

The idea of gains in either efficiency or in personalisation are two good places to start talking about the smart web with respect to education. A number of schools now have RFID library systems. No barcodes are scanned; a pile of books is simply placed on a reader pad and the radio frequency of the tag inside the book lets the catalogue know which items have been presented, and issues them accordingly. Library books are an obvious starting point, but soon we’ll have RFID tracking for all resources in school. With readers in traffic areas of a school, we’ll know exactly where the portable data projector is, or the DVD player. And if you’ve ever wandered around a school looking for something like that, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. Some schools have also started using the smart web for taking the roll, which a teacher then checks and confirms.

The teachers find this easier and faster, and have more time to spend on teaching.

Making sense of the world:

This avalanche of data pouring out of our cars, fridges, TVs, and washing machines also has quite a bit of potential for creating meaningful authentic learning for students. Think about what we could do with a study on regional variations in the weather if we knew the outside temperature at all of the homes of our students—and if we could map these in real time in class. How much would our students’ understanding of geography and its effect on the weather grow if they were exploring their own house? Or think about petrol consumption, or traffic flows, or city planning if our cars used GPS and the smart web to reveal traffic patterns? Most cars have at least one GPS in them these days considering all smartphones are actually GPSs.

Coming soon:

I always know the exact temperature at my house, not because my house is part of the smart web, but because one of my neighbours has rigged up a weather station that’s connected to his wifi network, which tweets the humidity level, temperature, wind speed, and how much rain we’ve had. So the smart web means that if your fridge isn’t tweeting, something else will be, in the not too distant future.

Links:

• Soon everything will be smarter than us
• What is 'the internet of things'?
• Manilla Hospital slashes infection rates with RFID technology