<Blogging as a filing cabinet> AI is clearly part of the future of education, but I suspect a lot of what's claimed now is utter bobbins. So do we chase every opportunity to use it now, or let other HEIs blow millions on bad tech then swoop in learn from their mistakes? AI in tertiary …
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Feral (2013), George Monbiot I'm writing the morning after the UEFA cup final. One manager, Chelsea's Thomas Tuchel, is being praised for tactical intelligence, one, Manchester City's Pep Guardiola, has been criticised for an apparently erratic squad choice. I didn't watch the game, so I'm not sure whether City played in a more interesting or …
Gravity assist: report of the digital teaching and learning review (February 2021)
In summer 2020, in response to the first national COVID-19 lockdown, we used learning analytics data to manage a calling campaign to students who appeared to have been most disadvantaged by the transition to wholly online learning. In essence, we pulled together a team of volunteers to contact students who appeared to have disengaged from …
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“Wait for it!” – Problems using predictions to instigate COVID 19 lockdowns
The reaction time of a typical human being is apparently 250 miliseconds. In other words, it takes us about quarter of a second to get out of the way of a speeding snowball, or catch the dropped vase. That stuff's easy - 1. Danger - 2. React - 3. Try not to look embarrassed when our response …
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Minimising Risk vs Maximising Success: learning analytics intervention strategies
At the other end of the phone is a student. Your learning analytics tool has predicted that they may be at risk of early departure. Under the circumstances they are likely to benefit from a supportive, sympathetic conversation, or perhaps they need a nudge or a jolt to make them realise they need to re-engage. …
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Onwards from Learning Analytics (OfLA)
At the time of writing, we are entering the final year of our latest Erasmus+ collaborative project. Onwards from Learning Analytics (OfLA) is a learning analytics project interested in supporting students at risk of leaving university early or failing to achieve their potential. We don't take the view that students ought to be retained no …
Moving Student Inductions Online: NTU Welcome Workshop case study
New student induction is a process. Students start their courses with some understanding of what it's going to be like, with a mountain of expectations and plenty of anxieties. Historically, universities often rush the transition process and seek to squeeze it into an administratively convenient week of guest lectures, important messages and introductory events. Of …
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Teaching in a COVID world: how the sector moved online
I'm sick of COVID. I'm sick of the isolation. I'm sick that virtual isn't the same as in real life. I know we've probably only got months to go now, but I'm sick of it all the same. It seems that at the moment there is a lot of discourse is about how hard it …
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Black Box Thinking – a review and a challenge to universities
This post is a piece of procrastination. And I'm partly writing it because Matthew Syed brilliantly describes a form of procrastination in his excellent book Black Box Thinking, but truthfully I'm just procrastinating because I'm putting off a task that I'm finding difficult. 🙂 The book deserves a better review than this, because I think it's …
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The NTU Student Dashboard – a brief explainer
So using the principle of blogging as a back up for memory, here is a short explainer about the learning analytics platform used at my institution, Nottingham Trent University. It's an attempt to introduce the resource as clearly as possible. It's meant to be a short intro, so writing a long intro starts to feel …
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