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!