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Research Questions and (Better) Learning Analytics

By Justin Reich — August 18, 2014 1 min read
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On Tuesday, August 19 at noon EST, I’ll be participating in a webinar with Audrey Watters, Andrew Sliwinsky, and Vanessa Gennarelli. We’ll be wrestling with the technical and ethical challenges of using data from online learning systems to improve teaching and learning. The full blurb is below, and you can RSVP here.

Big data, big problems.

We all want to help learners be successful. What “success” means and how we measure it means different things depending on your point of view. Additionally, issues of privacy and security haunt the conversation. Join us to hear how we think about this emerging field.

Join our crew: Audrey Watters of Hack Education, Andrew Sliwinski at Mozilla Foundation, Justin Reich of HarvardX and Berkman Center, Vanessa Gennarelli of P2PU.

We’ll be answering the following questions:

- What are the historical origins of “learning analytics”? Why do these suddenly matter?

- What should we be measuring? How does that stack up against what we are measuring? (How might “measuring” be a problem in and of itself?)
- Who does “Learning Analytics” well?
- Which ideas have shaped your thinking about learning analytics?
- How do teachers use the output from learning analytics? What are the challenges from informing instruction with data?

If you’d like to freshen up on the topic, we recommend the following resources:

- Learning Analytics: A Friday Night Rant
- Big Data Learning Research Breakthrough: Learning Activities Lead to Achievement
- No More Secret Sauce Analytics

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