8th Jisc Learning Analytics Network

The Open University was the venue for the 8th Jisc Learning Analytics Network. I’d not been there before. It was slightly eerie to see what was a clearly reconigsable university campus but without the exciting if slightly claustrophic atmosphere that thousands of students provide. I won’t report on everything, but will give some highlights most relevant to me. There’s more from Niall Sclater on the Jisc Learning Analytics blog.

The day kicked off with Paul Bailey and Michael Webb giving an update on Jisc’s progress. Referring back to their earlier aims they commented that things were going pretty much to plan, but the term ‘learner monitoring’ has thankfully been discarded. Their early work on legal and ethical issues set the tone carefully and has been a solid base.

Perhaps more clearly than I’ve seen before, Jisc have set their goal as nothing less than sector transformation. By collecting and analysing data across the sector they believe they can gain insights that no one institution could alone. Jisc will provide the central infrastructure including a powerful learning records warehouse, along with some standardised data transformation tools, to provide basic predictive and alerts functionality. They will also manage a procurement framework for insitutions who want more sophistication.

The learning records warehouse is a biggie here – currently with 12 institutions on board and around 200 million lines of activity. Both Moodle and Blackboard have plug-ins to feed live data in, and code for mainpulating historic data into the right formats for it.

Paul and Michael launched a new on-boarding guide for institutions at https://analytics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/on-boarding – A 20 step checklist to getting ready for learning analytics. Step 1 is pretty easy though, so anyone can get started!

Bart Rientes from the Open University showed again how important learning analytics is to them and how powerfully they can use it. Mapping all of the activities students undertake into seven different categories (assimilative, finding and handling information, communication, productive, experiential, interactive/adaptive, assessment) gives dashboards allowing course designers to visualise their courses. Add in opportunities for workshops and discussion and you have a great way of encouraging thinking about course design.

Interestingly, Bart reported that there was no correlation between retentition and satisfaction. Happy students fail and unhappy students pass, and vice versa. Which begs the question – do we design courses for maximum retention, or for maximum satisfaction, because we can’t have both!

Andrew Cormack, Chief Regulatory Advisor at Jisc, gave an update on legal horizons. The new General Data Protection Regulations is already on the statute books in the UK but comes into force on 1 May 2018. For a complex issue, his presentation was wonderfully straightforward. I shall try to explain more, but you can read Andrew’s own version at http://www.learning-analytics.info/journals/index.php/JLA/article/view/4554   [I am not a lawyer, so please do your own due diligence].

Much of the change in this new legislation involves the role of consent, which is downplayed somewhat in favour of accountability. This gives logic thus:

• We have a VLE that collects lots of data for its primary purpose – providing staff and students with teaching and learning activities.
• We have a secondary purpose for this data which is improving our education design, helping and supporting learners and we make these explicit upfront. We might also say any things that we won’t do, such as selling the data to third parties.
• We must balance any legitimate interest they have in using the data collected, against any risks of using the data that the data subject might face. But note that this risk does not need to be zero in order for us to go ahead.
• Andrew distinguished between Improvements (that which is general and impersonal, e.g. the way a course is designed or when we schedule classes) and Interventions (which go to an individual student to suggest a change in behaviour). The latter needs informal consent, the former can be based on legitimate interest. He also suggested that consent is better asked later in the day, when you know the precise purpose for the consent.
• So for example in a learning analytics project, we might only obtain consent at the first point where we intervene with a given student. This might be an email which invites them to discuss their progress with the institution, and the act of the doing so gives consent at the same time.

You can follow Andrew as @Janet_LegReg if you want to keep up with the latest info.

Thanks to Jisc for another really good event, and apologies to those I haven’t written about – there was a lot to take in!