Living the interface between learning analytics and actual change in a HE setting
Okay the title (and the whole page actually) is a little passive aggressive, but I'm reading lots of retention literature at the moment and I'll be honest, I'm sick of reading "Student retention has been a concern for some time now". So this is a public service for anyone writing a paper on student retention. As …
Continue reading Student Retention Research: A History Lesson
One of my many failings is my inability to live tweet conference sessions. I mean that I just about manage to quote profound micro statements with an out-of-focus picture of a slide, but I generally have no idea what it meant two weeks later. Let's see if I can make anything better from my 35 …
LSAC 2018 presentation In a fit of unexpected organisation (I'm clearly procrastinating from a less pleasant task), I've uploaded our presentation for the 2nd Learning & Student Analytics Conference, Amsterdam, 22-23 October. If you've just loaded this page because it's the end of the session and you wanted the slides - hello. Everyone else - …
I'm most of the way through Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise: the art and science of prediction" I'm really struck by the fact that as I'm reading, I'm learning new tools and reference points to critique our learning analytics work. It's quite possible that if I'd a background in social sciences, mathematics or computer …
Like the last post ('Everybody Lies'), Weapons of Math Destruction is written by a data scientist. However, there is a significant difference between the tone of the two texts. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is clearly a bright guy, still fascinated with the potential of big data (although make no mistake, he can see the flaws and potential …
In the UK, 2018 might come to be seen as an important year in our appreciation of just how significantly data is playing a role in our shaping our lives in ways that are surprising, horrifying and certainly without meaningful consent. We can be grateful of the actions of journalists in the Guardian and Channel …
Continue reading Everybody lies: what the internet can tell us about who we really are
Yes I'm going to follow up with a couple of book reviews, but I think the following taken from Cathy O'Neil's brilliant Weapons of Math Destruction deserves sharing widely. I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations. Though I will use models to estimate value, I will not …
Continue reading Should there be a data science equivalent of the Hippocratic oath?
I recently wrote a pre-conference workshop for the European First Year Experience Conference called "Arguably the First Year Experience is 109 years old: How up to date are you?"(1) with my colleague Diane Nutt. This post outlines some of theory relevant to anyone seeking to better understand the transitions associated with becoming a first year …
Continue reading Students in Transition: the challenges of becoming a first year student
Student Engagement drives the learning analytics resource we use. That is, we count students' use of various electronic proxies that are associated with participation on a course. However, before discussing those, I want to explore the concept of student engagement. In the UK there are broadly three definitions of student engagement: Students engaging with the …
How ideological are the algorithms used in learning analytics? At the core of any learning analytics process is the algorithm. Algorithms are just computational lines of code, so they're neutral, objective, unproblematic. Of course we have to take into account the legal GDPR requirements for privacy and destroying old data etc., but surely we don't …
