The weSPOT meeting is over... now back home!

The weSPOT meeting is over! Nice project, nice people and splendid food in a nice city: Graz :)

Six deliverables are in the oven and close to see the light of the real world ;).

KU Leuven is in charge of D3.3: User management and badges system. And I personally like the content.

The deliverable starts with the explanation of the weSPOT OAuth provider. We had a problem in weSPOT. Our log in system relies on OAuth providers... why? Simple... we wanted to simplify the process of users enrolling into our inquiry environment. So users could join our system using their Facebook and Google accounts. However, kids bellow thirteen shouldn't have the accounts... so we needed to provide them another mechanism to sign up in our system.

weSPOT created its own OAuth provider in the cloud. The provider is hosted in Google App Engine.

If you really want to know more about it... just check it out in our site! And if you want to deploy yours... don't hesitate to contact us!

We have also created several badges to engage users in the use of the system. Here you can see a screenshot.

Besides the interface and the rules, we also created a some sort of Open Badges API that provides the basic functionality to create, award and store the badges. If you consider it convenient, you can check the API. The source code is available, just in case you want to deploy your own instance ;).

Almost forgot! We also implement and will offer recommendation services. But this will have to wait... we don't still have them in the production version... be patient! :)

weSPOT attends #OBIE2014 and #icwl2014

We did it again! weSPOT attended two great events such as ICWL and OBIE (The 1st International Workshop on Open Badges in Education).

It was a good opportunity to show all our designs, thoughts and experiences with Open Badges.

We had discussions about questions such as:

How many badges should we design for a course?

What are the first actions that someone should take when s/he decides to deploy badges in her/his course?

Shall badges be a representation of competence/skills?

Moreover, Nate Otto presented a very interesting project that it is worth to take a look. This project discusses about design principles for badges. 

I would like to highlight also one of the papers presented in the main conference: Open Badges: Challenges and Opportunities . Authors reflect about the actual possibilities, limitations and future work in the field. They were also some of the organizers of the Workshop.

We have still many open questions since the concept of badges and its acceptance is still a challenge.

We also discussed about the perception that students have when we introduced badges. I explained our experience when some students were not very positive towards badges since, from their point of view, they consider Learning as a very serious activity. We also addressed the problem in an informal way explaining them that we look at them as goal representations.

One of the main conclusions that the badges acceptance require dialogue with all the different stakeholders.

Badges as we talk in our papers have different aspects to consider. They are considered game elements, but also represent goals and they have social recognition. We are interested in these two last elements. However, we need to deal with the possible perception of the first element.

Many experiments to deploy and fun experiences to enjoy... and soon also in weSPOT :).

Improving teacher awareness through activity, badge and content from José Luis Santos

weSPOT attends LAK and OLA meeting - Is learning Analytics just a big hype?

Finally, we just get to the end of an exhausting but amazing week! Many meetings, talks and the annoying jet lag!

 LAK and OLA has been an amazing opportunity to attend to many presentations and to have exhilarating conversations with many people... so let's try to summarize the experience a bit.

Personally, I had the opportunity to meet some folks from OUNL (Maren and Hendrick), that are working around Learning Analytics. They are  involved in the LACE project. One of the goals of LACE is to build a framework of quality indicators for learning analytics. They are in the brainstorming phase trying to collect those indicators, and weSPOT has contributed.

Hendrick is also in the process of collecting real data from their institutional LMS, what can bring them the opportunity to run different tests on such amazing dataset.

We had the opportunity to talk with folks from the Apereo foundation  as well, concretely with Alan Berg and Sandeep Jayaprakash. They are contributing to the OAAI initiative and trying to define the flow of information in a Learning Analytics Systems.

Both collaborations can be an opportunity to contribute with the expertise of KU Leuven: Learning Dashboards. Therefore, Sven will have soon the opportunity to do more of his cool stuff with more and different data.

Along the weekend, we participated in the the Open Learning Analytics meeting, somehow we are trying to define the roadmap for SOLAR and exploring how we can collaborate with each other, funding possibilities, etc.

But... what about the conference itself?

 First, I will share the proceedings and my slides (I have to admit though that the last slide was the one who got more attention :-P). Also it is worth mentioning the amazing work that some of the attendees did reporting on their own blogs, however, I think that Doug Clow and Stian Håklev were clearly the best.

 
(Advertising spot: Btw, Stian is about to finish his PhD as well as I (I hope ;)) and we are exploring the possibilities for "the next step"... yep... that step that every PhD student is scare of... what to do next???? Anyway... don't hesitate to contact us if you are looking for some collaboration! ;))

  But again... what is my opinion about the conference?

  Many cool things and impressive analyses of the data... but I have to mention two down sides:

• There were no dashboard presentations this year.
• I have the feeling that many of the learning analytics folks forget about the HCI aspects of learning analytics.

  Several times I have heard from many people the sentence of: "We are trying to solve a problem that may be does not exist, but addressing this nonexistent problem, we generate another problem that maybe we can address".

  But... what is going on? Why does people have this question in mind?

  They do cool stuff... but the adoption of their artifacts is slow or nonexistent.  Therefore... they come up with apparently a logical conclusion: I am doing something cool and useful, but if people don't use it... it is because they may not have the need.

  At one of the dinners, Abelardo Pardo was explaining one of his workshops experiences in Australia and New Zealand with academics... and one of the teachers asked just at the beginning of the workshop: what is wrong with the traditional way of lecturing?

  But we know that alternative ways of teaching influence certain aspects such as motivation, attention and novelty, and they may influence positively to the individual and social learning process.

  Is there a need? Ok... probably if we go to the Aristotle's definition of 'necessity'... there is no need... but we can get better on what we are doing and this first assumption is what should trigger the use of alternative methods... the goal of becoming better... although I have to admit that probably not everybody pursue this goal.

  However, HCI does quite a lot of research in this field of technology adoption. What are the common problems to attract user attention, how we can capture the user attention, how we can engage users in this process... and so on... and this kind of studies is something that I miss in LAK...

  We'll see if all these talks, events and experiences end up in some fruitful collaboration that it is what really matters... in the end... the knowledge acquisition is already done... so let's try to transfer some knowledge now...

Ah! and don't forget to watch the TED Talk about our view in Open Learning Analytics!