This led me to an article titled, "Learning Analytics: Avoiding Failure" for reassurance that my chosen emerging technology would not go the way of Beta Max video tapes. Learning analytics experts from around the world meet at an annual Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference. "Overall, the message of learning analytics experts was clear. In order not to fail it is necessary to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with learning analytics...". (Clow, 2017) Whether designing a lesson, a unit, or an entire course the first start is always identifying the learning objectives. Maybe the reason AltSchool failed was because their objective was profit instead of learning.
The second takeaway from the LAK experts, that AltSchool may have missed, is that learning analytics should use data in a way that works for the teachers and students in a logical and meaningful way.
Check out this great video by George Siemens, a leader in learning analytics!
One of the exciting possibilities in learning analytics is biometric eye-tracking. By measuring what people look at and how long they look at it can tell educators a lot, such as what keeps attention or what parts of texts a student struggles with. Research indicates that humor maintains attention. (Hooijdonk, 2016) While this may seem intuitive, imagine a lesson matched to a student's sense of humor to maximize engagement.
Although it may be a long while before schools have room for biometric eye-tracking in their budgets, there are current and practical solutions. Response Clickers, for example, can be a great way to track student data and measure learning and deliver instruction based on the results.
Hi David,
ReplyDeleteI find your blog on learning analytics very interesting. It is not a topic that I know much about and gained so much knowledge from reading your blog and watching the videos that you shared. I especially love the vocabulary.com resource that you shared, although it is not appropriate for first grade students, I love the concept behind it. The concept of biometric tracking sounds very exciting so that we can figure out what holds student attention and where students are struggling while reading. The possibilities seem endless. I am looking forward to learning more. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Carley, thanks for your response. I never considered the use of biometric tracking for 1st graders until now. 10th graders are expected to reflect on their own learning to a degree. It seems to me that first graders would be more dependent on a teacher's ability to collect data and deliver instruction accordingly. For this reason learning analytics could be very useful in earlier grades.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for your response.
It's always cool to see what the future of a classroom could look like, and learning analytics seems to be taking a step into the future. Using biometric tracking to study what keeps students' attention could be extremely useful in how we plan lessons. I can only assume that this will take extensive testing though. Hopefully there would be enough of a way to study all types of students and not just focus on the majority. No matter how hard we try, its possible that some students just don't care about school, and those students will show up in the biometric tracking as being the ones that are almost never focused. However, it would be great to see what actually does engage those students so we could use those techniques to get them excited about school.
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