Data & Analytics Summit, elearning guild, September 2016

word cloud:  learning analytics

Last week, I participated in the elearning guild's Data & Analytics Summit, a two-day series of sessions focusing on different kinds of data, collection of data, analysis of data, and what the future may hold in store.

Here some takeaways from the sessions:

Analytics means:   simultaneous use of statistics, software, operations research to quantify performance, meaningful pattern recognition, use of data visualization

How are we using the data: for description (what is happening?) or for diagnosis (why did x happen?) or for prediction (what is going to happen?) or for prescription (how can we make x happen?)

How do we get trusted data?  Not only do we pull in data from multiple sources, but we need to establish relationships with stake holders, so that we can trust the data they provide -- and we need to add to this data governance and quality assurance, a common language, visible data integrity and formal accountability.

A lot of the discussion was not focused on higher education but education in the workforce, which raises a very different set of questions -- still, these questions apply to our university community just as much as we have about 6,000 employees at the university, excluding student workers and graduate assistants.  This substantial number of people deserve serious though on how professional development can help them improve their lives and their jobs -- what areas might benefit from repeating micro-lessons to improve performance?

How is our workforce shifting and what does this mean for higher education:  We know we are moving more and more into a service-based society, and we have see that artificial intelligence (AI) can outperform humans already in a number of jobs.
The key is to self-regulated, self-directed, self-selected learning.  I was learning the other day about Chicago and how its museums, art galleries, and other public educational institutions focus on informal learning with elements of gamification.

Looking for a job?  Think Learning Analytics -- this is a growing field tha tneeds careful thinkers to make sense of the gobs and gobs of data.
Worried about your data?  You should be -- we need policies and governance to assure that all that data that is collected right now and that soon will include data collected through the Internet of Things is managed responsibly.
Finally:  Wanting to try something new? https://h5p.org/ for interaction. This web site makes it easy to develop interactive exercises that can be embedded into any web page, including your LMS.

Ok, I will stop rambling now...