NMC Learning Analytics Online Workshop Reflections

Event Listing http://www.nmc.org/events/learning-analytics-webinarOn iTunesU http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/nmc-horizon-connect-learning/id489707147NERLA – NorthEast Regional Learning AnalyticsDavid Wedaman, from Brandeis, and others are working on creating a Learning Analytics Center that will open resources for schools. I wonder if IST and Shelby Thayer with Outreach would be…

Event Listing http://www.nmc.org/events/learning-analytics-webinar
On iTunesU http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/nmc-horizon-connect-learning/id489707147

NERLA – NorthEast Regional Learning Analytics
David Wedaman, from Brandeis, and others are working on creating a Learning Analytics Center that will open resources for schools. I wonder if IST and Shelby Thayer with Outreach would be interested in this.

Tom Haymes, Houston Community College – Lessons learned and take-aways

  • Garbage-in > Garbage Out led to “what is learning and how do we want to measure it?” discussion
  • You gotta start “right” in order to get something useful out of the project
  • Measure skills rather than knowledge
  • Gamification tie-in [Tom mentioned someone, but I missed the name, will ask for the contact]
  • Technology won’t be expensive, the planning and analysis will be
  • His project is going to be open source via Gates Grant!
  • The Three-E Strategy for Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/TheThreeEStrategyforOvercoming/163448

Amber Stubbs – An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics

  • Computational linguistics, analyzing text
  • She has a book coming up in 2012
  • Corpus is a collection of natural language data – used for plagiarism detection, speech detection, machine translation
  • Toolkits – NLTK and MALLET and Weka
  • Unsupervised tasks – pour in the data and see what comes out (plagiarism detection)
  • Supervised tasks – annotate the data to get more accurate output; use training data (example: document classification)

Resources
http://www.educause.edu/blog/pkurkowski/ELIReleasesNewBriefonLearningA/229163
NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition http://www.nmc.org/publications/horizon-report-2012-higher-ed-edition
2012 NMC Horizon Project Short List http://www.nmc.org/publications/horizon-report-2012-higher-ed-edition

Reflection
PSU World Campus is currently considering the Pearson LMS. How does Pearson measure success? Because that drives the analytics behind student papers to high rates of graduation. I wonder how Pearson has communicated what their approach is. Would their decisions be the same that we would agree on? How could we know without a clear discussion internally and then with Pearson?