New prototype and playing with quartiles and outliers in STEP UP!

"subliminal" advertisement - REMEMBER: We organize LAK'13, are you ready for your submission? Do you have any good, amazing and original idea? Come on! Let's do it! ;) - the "subliminal" advertisement is finished- yes... I know... I don't really understand the concept of subliminal :)

As I already presented at the end of my presentation at LAK'12, we are trying to simplify STEP UP!.

First, we did an small prototype. You already know our iteration process methodology, aren't you? Otherwise, read one of our papers! ;)

 We didn't evaluate this prototype because I had a PhD meeting with Katrien and Erik, and during the discussion came up the idea of developing it for mobile devices. So then, I moved the code to JQuery mobile, giving us the following result:

What did we change from one prototype to other?

Basically, both follow the same concept except for the colors. In the first prototype, we used:

• red: Bad student!
• yellow: Careful! Maybe you should work more, shouldn't you?
• green: Good boy/girl! Good student!

But we realized that we can not say that from the activity of a social network, at least, with the analysis that we do. We try to encourage students to reflect on their data, we do not intend to say: "You are a good/bad student". So we decided to give different meaning to the colors:

• blue: cold activity. Dude! Your activity is lower than your peers. Up to you! Maybe you don't need anything from the community, but maybe the community need something from you. We are also learning how we can become good open learning students. Share your learning and knowledge for free and you will receive something back... not sure why, when and how but do it and you will see that!
• green: you are in the average activity... you are participating as most of your peers. It does not mean that your contributions are good, but you have at least the habit to contribute to the community, and it is also part of the process.
• red: "You are in the hot zone". What is going on with you? Are you a social network addicted? Are you addicted to study? Go to the real life and enjoy a beer with your peers! Just kidding.. for sure... this is not the message that we want to send to the students, on the other hand, it is quite similar... the student is participating over the average activity. Is it really necessary? If others are not so active, why are you so actively contributing? Reflect on that! If you really need it, do it! But it's important to be aware of this aspect.

Is the prototype already plugged to real data?

Yes! It is! We have already started to play with student data. For instance, the screenshot above contains real data of this week. We have already finished the lectures of the course so this week there is no so many activity.

Once that we had the prototype, we had to decide what would be the criteria to translate data activity to a percentage to fill the bar. First, we thought in the arithmetic mean, we implement it. But we were not totally convinced... why? How do you detect outliers?

So we decided to go for the concept of box plots calculating quartiles and outliers. We found a really easy way to calculate quartiles that made our work easier. And how can we calculate the outliers? Also it's very simple.

• IQR = Q3 - Q1
• Up Outliers > Q3 + 1.5*IQR
• Down Outliers < Q1 - 1.5*IQR

 All the students with an activity between Q3 and Q1 have filled their bar with color and the percentage is between 25% and 75%.

Students with an activity bellow Q1 go from 0 to 25% (and blue color) and above Q3 (and red color), from 75 to 100%. Outliers are assigned respectively to 0% and 100%.

What do you think? Does it make sense? If you have better idea, don't hesitate to share it with us!
  

LAK'12 conclusions

After some days, I've had time to think about LAK'12 conference.

BTW, really important note: Next year, we are going to organize LAK'13 in Leuven! So prepare your submissions... we are waiting for your contribution!

But how do we see Learning Analytics? You can check some slides from my Prof. Erik Duval or some of his thoughts about Educational Data Mining vs Learning Analytics.

But, what are my conclusions after LAK'12?

I would summarize it with a really nice photo that I took during my days off in Vancouver.

What does this photo mean to me?

The conference is finished, but now we have a nice picture of what our community in learning analytics is working on. The mountains (our goals) are still far away, but we only have to swim (to work) to get there. One day is over, but we are sure that tomorrow is going to start another great day. I think that it's really nice when you finish a conference with this kind of feeling.

It was a really nice experience that give me a lot of food for thought. I would highlight a really nice talk with Jon Dron who during the demo session gave me some interesting pointers (i.e. The Design of Everyday Things and Dr. Vive Kumar (still I have to take a look to his work)) and I had the opportunity to discuss with him issues regarding privacy and my PhD topic.

Another positive aspect is to read a bit the conclusions from others (i.e Abelardo's blog, Doug Clow's Blog, Audrey Watters' blog, ... ). People who share their thoughts about the topic... the common conclusion after every conference is that sharing knowledge is the key to progress in a research field and there is people doing a great job in that! So I only can say thanks guys to share your thought with all of us!

After my presentation, I had also a really nice talk about how to engage people in the reflection process. One easy argument is to include this process in the learning itinerary. However, we are often tracking sensible data and we can not force students to give it (i.e. tracking data beyond of the LMS common problem with Abelardo's group work). In our case, we track data from different systems and they have to give us their API keys to have access to their own data. If we include the reflection process in the learning itinerary, the tracking becomes mandatory... and somehow the final feeling is that everything is corrupted (in addition it can be against the law). We are trying to engage students in the process of open learning, show and share your thoughts with the world and somehow it will come back with some additional food for thought. Sharing your information and reflection should be a voluntary and participatory process. It is our premise.

Also, I had a really nice talk with David García-Solórzano from the Open University of Catalonia regarding his paper: "Educational Monitoring Tool Based on Faceted Browsing and Data Portraits". Damn! They are really doing nice work. I really encouraged him to evaluate their prototype because I think that it has a lot of possibilities. They are concentrating a lot of information and I think that they need to get some feedback now. Also, it was really nice to hear that he got a lot of inspiration from the paper "Attention please! Learning analytics for visualization and recommendation" by Erik Duval. You feel somehow lucky and think: "Yeah! And I am doing the PhD with him". Afterwards, you wonder why he hasn't still fired you after questioning all his ideas in the PhD meetings... I guess that it's the PhD student syndrome, we think that we know more than we actually know... or maybe it's my personal syndrome but I feel better thinking that others share the same problem... as the saying goes:

"It is a fool's consolation the think everyone is in the same boat"

Cheers! ;)