Simon's presentation to NLC LA: Dream, Nightmare, Fairydust?

Thank you Simon for the cautions on the future of learning analytics: will it be dream, nightmare, or fairydust?

I find the metaphor of the learner dashboard mirror to reflect on one’s own capacities as a key component of intelligent learning analytics. When we look at the EDUCAUSE chart from George Siemen’s paper on “Penetrating the Fog”on academic analytics versus learning analytics, the key difference seems to be the stakeholders. Academic analytics stakeholders are administrators, funders, marketing, governments and education authorities. Learning analytics stakeholders are learners and faculty. I would argue that further differentiation is necessary to define learning analytics of benefit to learners only.

Predictive models help identify learner, curriculum, and study success patterns. Purdue Signals gives students and faculty real time traffic lights. Faculty may be able to identify at risk students sooner, or pinpoint students that may be ready to drop out, and thus intervene. Analytics for the faculty may help with curriculum redesign, course sequence rethinking, and other scenarios that will eventually benefit the student.

What do the above have to do with “…their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.”? (Livingstone, 1941) We want our learners of today and the future to know how to learn what they want or need to learn when it is needed, be creative and innovative, collaborate, communicate, problem solve, and be information literate. The key points that learning management systems and other computing systems make is connecting analytics to student behaviors without understanding the meaning of the behaviors, and to student achievement, not necessarily to student learning, their capacity to learn, or their curiosity. Many of these systems have goals to identify the at-risk, provide support for students who need it, and increase student success rate. These are all aimed at achievement, which we, as educators know is not necessarily learning. Behaviorist philosophy of the past century defined learning as an observable change in behavior, whereas now it is accepted to view learning as changes in our mental associations that come through experience, and as such are not always observable. Learning how to learn whatever one needs to learn, or the capacity to conduct inquiry or problem solve are not necessarily supported by the analytic systems first described.

Learning analytic systems that empower the learner to learn from him/herself, reflect on their own learning, pursue authentic inquiries, and build learning dispositions and capacities will most likely be most effective as the “mirror dashboard” in your talk.

The ELLI is a self-reporting questionnaire, tapping at the unobservable, but personally relevant learning dimensions. The visual spider diagram gives feedback for the present, and record of changes. Awareness of learning dispositions, strategies for moving forward, the spider diagram, have been demonstrated to have significant effect on learner’s learning. ELLI within a social network, supplemented with mentoring, may be the vision to deal with our complex world.