Tuesday Oct 8, 2019: Practical Analytics in Curriculum Complexity

In this session, we will be watching “Practical Analytics in Curriculum Complexity – A Summer Analytics Academy Webinar”, which was part of the Webinar series offered by the Centre for Student Analytics (Utah State University) over the summer.

In this webinar, Dr. Mitchell Colver discusses the curriculum tool https://curricula.academicdashboards.org/ in the framework of sustainable analytics. One of the big questions discussed in the webinar is “How do you socialize analytics in a practical way?”.

There a lot of points that are valuable to consider and discuss in our contexts at UBC. We don’t expect to get through the entire video, and our hope is for it to generate some discussion amongst ourselves as we go.

Tuesday Sep 24, 2019: Shenia Tung

Shenia has been working as a work learn student at UBC Faculty of Arts over the summer, designing and developing student-facing dashboards for edX MOOC courses. In this session, Shenia walked us through her project:

“As a summer Work Learn student, I developed a student-facing dashboard for MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) students on edX. The dashboard design is similar to widget developed by Dr. Dan Davis, available here https://dan7davis.github.io/papers/LAL_Davis.pdf, surrounding the central idea that MOOC learners can benefit from understanding the learning habits of successful MOOC students in a past iteration of the course they are taking. This project spanned from May 2019 to August 2019 under the supervision of Ms. Sanam Shirazi at UBC Arts ISIT.”

Monday May 6, 2019: Marko Prodanovic

Marko is a Student Learning Analytics Developer at Sauder. In this session, he will be telling us about the Canvas project that he has been working on this last term. From Marko:

“As a newcomer to Learning Analytics, I’ve spent the last several months exploring techniques for data collection, cleaning, and visualization in an effort to pull meaningful insights from Canvas data. During this LAVA meeting, I will discuss some of the interesting discoveries and talking points I’ve come across throughout this process — with an emphasis on the Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC) technology. I’ll be going through the process of building and using a Tableau WDC at a high level, as well as discuss some potential technical challenges and shortcomings with this tool. I’ll root my discussion in an example WDC and visualization that I’ve built, and pose some higher-level LA and Data Vis questions to the group (I’d love to learn more!). Note, the talk will be somewhat technical in spirit but doesn’t require any background knowledge on programming concepts or Tableau.”

March 29-30: Learning Analytics + Canvas API Hackathon

We had a blast at UBC’s 5th Canvas API and Learning Analytics Hackathon that was co-organized by LAVA, UBC LA Project and CAPICO.  This two-day event took place from 4:00 PM–7:00 PM on Friday, March 29 and from 9:00 AM–7:00 PM on Saturday, March 30. Participants formed teams and worked towards planning, designing, and building applications and dashboards aimed at improving student learning and experiences. With over 100 participants attending, the event was sold-out.

Day 1 started with a design thinking workshop, walking all the participants through the process of problem definition and ideation to come up with their own solutions. On day 2, two tracks were offered – beginner and advanced – which allowed students with different skill levels to participate and engage in a series of workshops that walked them through the process of retrieving, cleaning, and then visualizing learning data from Canvas API. Students got a chance to learn how to present and sell their ideas and continued to hack their way. The hackathon was concluded by teams presenting their ideas, projects, and learnings along the way.

During the hackathon, participants were provided with mentorship, data, coffee, and food.  For more information, visit: https://learninganalytics.ubc.ca/hackubc/

 

Monday March 25th, 2019: Enrollment Pathways & Course Sequencing

We have three of the LAVA regulars presenting; Craig Thompson (Research Analyst, Learning Analytics Project),  Alison Myers (Research Analyst, Sauder School of Business) and Sanam Shirazi (Senior Research Analyst, Faculty of Arts). We will also be joined by Igor Kuznetsov (Research Analyst, Planning and Institutional Research ).

In this session, will be talking about and demonstrating some projects related to “enrollment pathways & course sequencing”. Each of the presenters will talk about examples of questions and related output regarding course pathways/student program progression etc. The goals are to share some of the work we have each done in the area and generate discussion: about the questions being asked, the methods and tools used to answer the question, or other points of interest.

 

Monday Feb 25th, 2019: Firas Moosvi

*Note – this meeting was rescheduled from February 11th

Firas Moosvi is a Learning Scientist working on the UBC Learning Analytics Project. In this session, he will discuss the potentials of Learning Analytics to surface classroom inequities.

“Though the field of learning analytics is new to me, I continue to be fascinated by its potential to transform teaching practice. For the first part of this LAVA meeting, I will present examples of how Learning Analytics has been used to surface trends of classroom inequities to instructors and institutions. Inequities include everything from gender, ethnicity, prior knowledge, and even personalities. I have a couple of papers already, but if you know of any examples that you thought are particularly striking, feel free to send them my way! In the second part, I hope to generate some discussion with the following prompt: “It is our responsibility as members of a university community to help highlight and address classroom inequities (where possible). No prior readings, come by for a fun and (maybe) spirited discussion! As always, standard disclaimer: views and opinions are my own.”

Monday Jan 28, 2019

In today’s session, we will be discussing a recent research publication“Instructors’ Perceptions of Networked Learning and Analytics”  from the Canadian Journal of Learning & Teaching, Fall 2018 issue. In this paper, researchers from Dalhousie & Ryerson University, Canada share the result of a study aimed at understanding instructors’ perception of social network analysis and network visualization tools as means for gaining insights about student online interactions in their class.

Some questions to think about ( suggested by Alison Myers):

  • If you are an instructor do you share the perceptions?
  • If you have been involved with piloting Threadz, do you think the tool is comparable to Netlytics (used in the study)?
  • Anyone with experience using Netlytics willing to briefly overview the tool?
  • How would you conduct similar research at UBC? (Or if you have started conducting any Threadz analysis, any initial findings?)

Monday Nov 26, 2018: Stoo Sepp

Stoo is a PhD Candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Wollongong Australia, exploring the role that gestures play in cognition and learning. In this session, he will tap into multimodal learning analytics as a means to capture such physical interactions:

“To explore the role of gestures, a novel instrument for data collection was developed, which seeks to capture the physical interactions learners have with multimedia learning materials focusing on learning geometry. By leveraging the touch-based technologies in iPads, physical interactions with learning materials as well as quantitative data related to these interactions can be captured, and parsed. This novel instrument has implications for the field of Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA), potentially opening the door to a new field of Embodied Learning Analytics (ELA) and presents an interesting path forward for the measurement of embodied data, and how this may inform teaching and learning.  This presentation will provide a brief theoretical overview, as well as a demo of the developed apps.”

Monday October 15, 2018: Kazem Banihashem

Role of Learning Theories in the Use of Learning Analytics

Kazem is a PhD candidate in the field of educational technology at Allameh Tabataba’i University (ATU), Tehran, Iran and currently a PhD visiting scholar at UBC.  In this session, Kazem will discuss:

“In my presentation, I would like to talk about the role of learning theories in the use of learning analytics in education and then I will explain about my dissertation and the goals I and my supervisors are hoping to achieve in that research. My dissertation focuses on development of an instructional design model based on constructivism theory in higher education with a focus on learning analytics. “

October 27-28: UBC Learning Analytics Student API Hackathon

We would like to invite you to the 4th UBC Learning Analytics Hackathon, which will take place on October 27-28, 2018.   This event is organized by UBC Learning Analytics Pilot, LAVA and CAPICO.

Did you know that Canvas includes an API for accessing and modifying your learning data in your own programs and scripts?  Have you ever wondered if you could build a Canvas app that improves your own learning? This fall, the hackathon will explore how the Canvas API can be used to improve student learning and experiences.

This event brings together students, researchers, faculty, staff, and any other interested individuals to get hands-on experience with analyzing and working with the Canvas API. During this two-day hackathon, participants will form teams, work with Canvas’s REST API, design and build apps and dashboards, and then show off what they accomplished at the end of the weekend with a brief presentation. Prizes and awards will be given out for interesting projects.

During the hackathon, we will provide mentorship, refreshments, and lunches. You can learn more and register here: https://events.ctlt.ubc.ca/events/ubc-learning-analytics-student-api-hackathon/

 

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