Activity 3 – Week 12 (Analysing Learning Analytics – Entrepreneurs)
This experience is designed to create an analysis of the current market for Learning Analytics Ventures. Its purpose is to help you understand critical information in the analysis, design and evaluation of a social/learning analytics venture. Multiple roles are presented: students, educators, instructional designers, venture analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors.
You may respond to one or more of the categories as desired.
This Blog is dedicated for your response as Entrepreneurs
What aspects of learning analytics would you explore?
What kind of products would you create?
These questions are prompts. You may use them or respond in any other way.
To respond, simply reply in the comments section below this post.
To respond to other roles go to:
Educators/Instructional Designers
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Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
David William Price 8:42 am on November 25, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Data is essential for good decision-making. Unfortunately, data alone can result in poor decisions. We tend to focus on data and interpretations that support our preconceived notions, and ignore data that conflicts with our ideas. Even when it comes to analytics for the web, there are search engine optimization specialists who have to analyze the data and make reasoned suggestions to clients on what to do with it to achieve certain goals.
The value of analytics is in collecting data on real behaviours because people lie. They don’t necessarily lie maliciously, but they do lie. They will say something is a great idea but when it comes down to the moment of paying… suddenly things can change very quickly. I’ve seen businesses built on ideas that seemed to make sense and that generated lots of enthusiasm and investment, but in the end customers weren’t willing to pay for the products. Somehow the product managers and executives and investors got lost in a filter bubble and never accessed the data they really needed to identify and capitalize on a problem that people would be willing to pay to solve.
We do the same thing in learning. We believe we are “working hard” when reality shows we are wasting time daydreaming, surfing, Facebooking, reading news clips. Analytics represent a way of helping us gain insight into the reality of our behaviour. I remember a major corporation brought in a consultant who had employees record the time they spent on each task. As a lawyer, I had to do the same thing. That kind of discipline can make you highly aware of your efficiency (or lack thereof). Think of students who insist they read the textbook or the instructions and yet fail to understand the basic requirements. Think of how long it can take to read journal articles when you are tired, anxious and distracted, and how quickly they go by when you can skim them effectively.
How much of our time is really used effectively? How might insight into the time we spend teaching or learning things help us recognize the value of changing our strategies? How might analytics help us identify where most of our time is going, and how efficiently we are using it? If we connect analytics with learning outcomes, how might this information help us change the way we study, the way we teach, and the kinds of activities we use to reinforce learning?
Analytics could help balance our preconceived notions and provide more real-time feedback about our approaches than end of term exams. The more we get real time feedback on performance, the more control we can feel about how we choose to do our teaching and learning.
The next step is to connect the analytics of behaviour and learning outcomes to practical advice. Imagine this kind of assistance:
“You seem to spend 10 minutes reading each page of the journal article. The time you spend causes you not to be able to finish your readings. You tend to be unprepared in class and ask or answer few questions. You could improve your performance with some simple reading techniques: (list, scaffolding through using them)”
Allie 12:16 pm on November 25, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
As an addendum, I’m wondering if we might say that people mis-represent, rather than lie about the time they spend on task; part of lying is intending to deceive, which I don’t think is true in all cases.
But the broader thing I find quite interesting about this is the notion that we might develop learning analysis tools for students to help them enhance their personal productivity as learners by helping them identify what their optimal conditions for learning are (such as time of day, or environment). That is something I haven’t yet seen. There may be something within the non-learning tech marketplace (certainly there are enough productivity apps out there and apps that restrict one from visiting websites during certain times of day) that could be used as a model for something learning oriented.
Allie 11:57 am on November 25, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
very interesting post, David. I like how you emphasize the importance of connecting analytics to learning outcomes – something I don’t think is especially well represented in the social/learning analytics marketplace at present, with the exceptions of those products that are specifically designed for teachers and learners to use – such as School of One and Socrato.