analytics – Page 2 – howsheilaseesIT

Are we just all data end points?

I’ve had two very contrasting data experiences this week which are both clarify and confusing my views on data and learning analytics. Firstly there was the LACE (learning analytics community exchange) project webinar titled: Big Picture of Learning Analytics Interoperability. Brian Kelly has written up the event and his blog post contains a link to the recording.

If you think about it, interoperability is key to any kind of data and analytical work. However as the webinar explained, learning analytics has the added complication of the numerous levels and models it can work in and across. The project are very keen to engage stakeholders around concepts but I think they are suffering from the classic chicken and egg scenario just now. They want to engage with the community, but some of the abstract terms do make it difficult for the community (and I include myself here) to engage with, so they need real examples. However I’m not sure right now how I can engage with these large concepts. But in my next post where I’ll update on the work we;re doing here at GCU it might become clearer. I am very keen to be part/track this community so I guess I need to try harder to engage with the higher level concepts.

Anyway, as you’ll know, dear reader, I have been experimenting with visual note taking so used the webinar yesterday to do just that. It’s an interesting experience as it does make you listen in a different way. Asking questions is also kind of hard when you are trying to capture the wider conversation. This is my view naive of the webinar.

In contrast, the University of Edinburgh’s “Digital Scholarship Day of Ideas : Data” had a line up of speakers looking at data in quite a different way. Luckily for me, and others, the event was live streamed and the recording will be available over the next few days on the website. Also Nicola Osborne was in attendance and live blogging – well worth a read whilst waiting for the videos to be uploaded.

A common theme for most of the speakers was exploration of the assumption that data is neutral. Being a digital humanities conference that’s hardly surprising, but there were key message coming through that I wish every wannabe and self proclaimed “big data guru”, could be exposed to and take head of. Data isn’t neutral, and just because you put “big” it front of it doesn’t change that. It is always filtered and not always in a good way. I loved how Annette Markham described how advertisers can use data to flatten and equalise human experience, and her point that not all human experiences can be reduced to data end points however much advertisers selling an increasingly homogenised, consumerist view of the world want it to be.

This resonated in particular with me as I continue to develop my thoughts around learning analytics. I don’t want to (or believe that you can) reduce learning to data end points that have a set of algorithms which can “fix” thing i.e. learner behaviour. But at the same time I do believe that we can make more use of the data we do collect to help us understand what is going on, what works, what doesn’t and allow us to ask more questions around our learning environments. And by that I mean a holistic view of learning environment that the individual develops themselves as much as the physical and digital environments they find themselves in. I don’t want a homogenised education system, but at the same time I want to believe that using data more effectively could allow our heterogeneity to flourish. Or am I just kidding myself? I think I need to have a nice cup of tea and think about this more. In the meantime I’d love to hear any views you may have.

Exploring the digital university – next steps digital university ecosystems?

Regular readers of this (and my previous) blog, will know that exploring the notion of just what a digital university is, c/should be is an ongoing interest of mine. Over the past couple of years now my colleague Bill Johston and I have shared our thinking around the development of a model to explore notions of the digital university. The original series of blog posts got very high viewing figures and generated quite a bit of discussion via comments. We’ve developed the posts into a number of conference presentations and papers. But the most exciting and rewarding development was when Keith Smyth from Edinburgh’s Napier University contacted us about the posts in relation their strategic thinking and development around their digital future. Which in turn will help them to figure out what their vision of digital university will look like.

For the past year Bill and I have been critical friends to Napier’s Digital Futures Working Group. This cross institutional group was tasked with reviewing current practice and areas of activity relating to digital engagement, innovation and digital skills development, and with identifying short term initiatives to build on current practice as well as proposing possible future developments and opportunities. These will be shared by Napier over the coming months. Being part of the Napier initiative has encouraged me to try and develop a similar approach here at GCU. I’m delighted that we have got senior management backing and later this month we’ll be running a one day consultation event here.

Earlier this week Bill, Keith and myself had a catch up where we spent quite a bit of time reflecting on “our journey” so far. Partly this was because we have another couple of conference paper submissions we want to prepare. Also as we now have a very rich set of findings from the Napier experience we needed to think about our next steps. What can we at GCU learn from the Napier consultation experience? What are the next steps for both institutions? What common issues will emerge? What common solutions/decision points will emerge? What are the best ways to share our findings internally and externally?

As we reflected on where we started we (well, to be precise, Bill) began to sketch out a kind of process map of where we started (which was a number of lengthy conversations in the staff kitchen between Bill and I) to where we might be this time next year, when hopefully we will have set of actions from GCU.

The diagram below is an attempt to replicate Bill’s diagram and outline the phases we have gone through so far. Starting with conversations, which evolved into a series of blogs posts, which evolved in conference papers/presentation, the blog posts were spotted by Keith and used as a basis for the development of their Digital Futures Working group, which is now being used as an exemplar for work beginning here at GCU.

I am more and more convinced that one of the key distinguishing features of a digital university is the ability of staff and students to have a commonly shared articulation and experience of the digitally enabled processes they engage with on a daily basis, and equally a shared understanding of what would be missing if these processes weren’t being digitally enabled. You know, the digital day of student, lecturer, admin person type of thing, but not visions written by “futurologists”, ones written by our staff and students. Alongside this we could have the daily live of the physical spaces that we are using. So for example we could have overlays of buildings not only showing the footfall of people but also where and when they were accessing our wifi next works etc.

Now, I know we can/could do this already (for example we already show access/availability of computers in our labs via our website) and/or make pretty good educated guesses about what is happening in general terms. However it is becoming easier to get more data and more importantly visualise it in ways that encourage questions around “actionable insights’ not only for our digital spaces, digital infrastructure but our physical ones too. Knowing and sharing the institutional digital footprint is again central to the notion of digital university.

Alongside this, by using learning analytic techniques can we start to make see any correlations around where and why students are online? Can we understand and learn from patterns around access and engagement with learning activities? Are students are using our uni provided spaces and wifi to do the majority of their uni work or to download “stuff” to listen/watch/read to on the bus? Are they just accessing specialist software/kit? Does it matter if they all have Facebook/youtube/whatsapp open all the time if we are confident (through our enhanced data driven insights) that they are successfully engaging with our programmes and that they have the digital literacy skills to connect and collaborate with the right people in the right spaces (both on and offline)?

As we were talking one word kept coming. It’s maybe a bit old fashioned, I know they were all the rage a few years ago particularly in the repository sphere, but we did think that mapping the ecosystem of a digital university could be the next logical step. The ecosystem wouldn’t just be about the technology, infrastructure and data but the people and processes too. Via the the SoLar discussion list I discovered the Critical Questions for Big Data article by Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford. As part of their conclusions they write:

“Manovich (2011) writes of three classes of people in the realm of Big Data: ‘those who create data (both consciously and by leaving digital footprints), those who have the means to collect it, and those who have expertise to analyze it’. We know that the last group is the smallest, and the most privileged: they are also the ones who get to determine the rules about how Big Data will be used, and who gets to participate.”

In terms of a digital university, I think we need to be doing our utmost to ensure we are extending membership of that third group, but just now there is a need to raise awareness to all about how and where their data is being collected and to give them a voice in terms of what they think is the best use of it.

What a digital university will actually look like will probably not differ that much from what a university looks like today, what will distinguish it will be the what happens within it and how everyone in that university interacts and shares through a myriad of digitally enabled processes.

How Sheila's been seen this week – network visualisations and am I really a techie? (a touch of #lak14)

Like many of peers, my working life is a bit of a hybrid. Part of my invited speaker session at last year’s ALT-C conference involved me trying to deconstruct what I actually did. Since then I have moved to a job with a more recognisable and commonly understood title ‘”Senior Lecturer”. However I don’t actually do much lecturing so it’s still all a bit complicated. I’m part of the Blended Learning Team within our Learning Enhancement and Academic Development unit. The three of us are technically literate but I don’t think any of us would identify ourselves as been technical or indeed techies. So I still find it a bit odd when the rest of our colleagues refer to us as technical. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about identity and networks and how I am perceived both internally and externally.

Now I know I am more technically digitally literate and crucially technically confident than many of my colleagues. Working with Cetis for so long it would have been kinda hard not to be. But I always have seen myself as a fulfilling a bridge or hybrid type role between the totally IT/technically focused people and those on the user/teaching and learning side of things. I think this is becoming increasingly common place and it needs to be so. As technology becomes easier to use and more embedded into all aspects of our lives, we need to encourage people to have a “let’s have a go” mind set, than “let’s ask the techies” – or in my case pseudo techie. Developing that aspect of digital literacy and confidence in our staff and students is, imho, crucial in terms of any institutional ambitions we at GCU (and anywhere else for that matter) may have of becoming a digital university.

That said I’m not above donning the technical genius hat as I amaze colleagues with my skills and knowledge when they ask “have you heard of animoto?” The hat has been firmly removed as two minutes after I demo’d it, they had rumbled how easy it was to use and all those links I sent were actually automagically created in the cloud.

The annual learning analytics conference, LAK14, is taking place this week, and I’ve been dipping in and out of the twitter backchannel over the past couple of days. Thanks to the live blogging genius of Doug Clow, and others I feel like I’ve almost been there in person. One of the sessions on Thursday was looking at networks and network visualisations. These fascinate me, but like many I’m still trying to figure out what they actually mean in terms of learning and teaching. I’ve had some thoughts in relation to my experiences as a learner in MOOCs, but there’s lots more head scratching and experimentation to be done. One of the tools being demo’d was Netlytic,

“a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize large volumes of text and discover social networks from online conversations on social media sites such as Twitter, Youtube, blogs, online forums and chats. “

I had a bit of a play and within minutes had an analysis and visualisation on of text from the #lak14 hashtag – thanks to twitter it was almost like I was there!

and a visualisation of my twitter network

Now, just need to figure out if this is more useful than the Martin Hawksey’s quite brilliant TAGs Explorer . . .

Getting ready for learning analytics at GCU (not quite #lak14)

This week I’m going to try and keep up with the twitter back channel from #lak14 in Indianapolis, already it looks like some really interesting and innovative work is being presented. However, back in my world our learning analytics journey is really just beginning.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to do some basic investigation, introductions and explorations of learning analytics initially with colleagues from IT and the Library. We are very much a the who, where, why, when and how stage. So it’s been really useful to look back at the Cetis Analytics Series and also at the presentations from the UK Solar Flare events. As ever the generosity of the community in sharing experiences is invaluable. This presentation from Mark Stubbs at MMU helped to clarify a few things for our IT department in terms of data sources we need along side data from the VLE. This slide was particularly useful.

BTW we need another one of those SoLar events soon . . .

However we do have access to some data, particularly from our VLE, GCU Learn. Every year we produce a Blended Learning report which gives a snapshot overview of activity in GCU Learn across the University. Getting and cleansing the data is always a bit of a chore and we are aware that the we can only provide a superficial view of activity. I won’t go into the ins and outs of our data access and data gate-keeping issues but I suspect that you, dear reader will understand so of our “challenges”.

In broad visual terms we have broken our blended learning activity into four main areas (click on the image to see in more detail, btw the tools/activities are just samples not a definite list for each area.)

We can get data at school level (we have three large academic schools) but not at department or module level. Given the dates of our semesters, annual stats are not much use either as they include weeks when there is no teaching so again that can skew the data. This year we decided to take one month, November 2013, and base the report on that. So although what we have is a very high level overview there are some clear trends coming through. To quote the Cetis definition of analytics, these trends are indeed giving us some ‘actionable insights’ not only in terms of blended learning activity but also in terms of our wider IT and support provision.

So get ready here are our headline figures:

•        18% decrease in average student accesses to GCULearn via the web
•        420% increase in average student accesses to GCULearn via mobile app
•        25% increase in number of GCULearn Communities
•        82% increase in use of CampusPack blogs
•        134% increase in use of wikis
•        232% increase in use of journals
•        222% increase in online feedback via Grademark in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12
•        167% increase in online Graded papers in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12

We don’t have a mobile or byod strategy and looks like we might not need one. It’s happening, our users are talking with their mobile devices, and 80% of those devices are iOS. What we need to ensure is that our content is web enabled and ensure that students can interact fully with activities via mobile devices. A “switch on” policy and, probably more importantly, culture for learning and teaching is something we need to work with staff and students to develop. Ubiquitous and stable wifi across the institution is key to this. Improvements to Bb’s mobile app would help too and we can’t wait for the roll out of their new web enabled design to be in place.

Staff and students are using the more interactive and student centred functionality of the VLE such as wikis and journals. And the use of assessment and feedback functionality is increasing dramatically. We estimate that 41% of our modules are making active use of GCU Learn as opposed to just having a course shell and some powerpoint slides. Now we need to drill down into that school level data to get more module level detail on the types of assignments/activities being used, and in tandem develop staff confidence in using, developing and sharing assessment rubrics and their overarching learning designs.

We are only starting to scratch the surface of learning analytics in our context, but the data we are getting is leading us to ask more detailed questions and demand more nuanced data collection and sense making. We are starting to bring people together to have data driven conversations, and share just exactly where our data is, who has access to it, when they have access to it, what format it is in, and how they access it. We have had initial discussion with Bb about their analytics package, however we need to have more internal discussions about what we can and want to do internally before making any decisions about that. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to share the next part of our journey very soon.

What Sheila's seen this week – learning analytics, data and open education

It’s been a really busy couple of weeks here at blended learning HQ at GCU. My colleagues are in the middle of preparing our annual blended learning report. There’s not a huge amount I can add this year, but it is a great opportunity to find out more about what is happening, so data and analytics have been high on the agenda. For the past couple of years there’s been an encouraging increase in the use and access to our VLE, which we call GCU Learn. This year the web accesses are down but the mobile accesses have increased exponentially with Apple devices far and away the most popular. Tuesdays also seem to be a popular day . . . We’re also seeing a significant uptake in use of turnitin and trademark. E-assessment and feedback is definitely something staff and students want and are using.

Last Friday we met with Blackboard about and they took us through their analytics platform. I was in that strange position of being quoted back to myself, as they were referencing the Cetis Analytics Series quite heavily. Still a great piece of work, and if you haven’t had a look, and are interested in analytics I would throughly recommend it. We are probably not at the stage to start working with their system yet. There are some key questions that need some really serious discussion, not least around benchmarking. But I am now taking a leaf out of my own book and really considering the who, what, where, why and how of data here.

Although I’m not exactly a newbie anymore, I am still finding my way around and getting to know what people are doing in terms of blended learning. Our Engineering and Built Environment School had a lunchtime “technology taster” session yesterday which gave me the opportunity to see some of the practice in that school. There was a really good mix of activities including the use of WebPA, screen capture and various student response systems packed into an hour. We’re developing case studies of practice just now so a few more names were added to my list of people to speak to. Library colleagues also gave a demo of BoB our national broadcasting recording service. You can easily create playlists of clips and or whole tv/radio programmes which can be embedded into webpages and most VLEs. The slight downside for us is that we don’t have complete single sign on and BoB uses Athens authentication so if we embed in our VLE students will have to login with their Athens details to view . . . but hopefully that will change relatively soon.

There is a lot of activity around new IT infrastructure as well as overarching discussions and consultations around a new institutional strategy to take us to 2020. I’m really pleased that I have the opportunity to take forward the work I’ve been doing with Bill Johnston and Keith Smyth on exploring the concept of the digital university as a possible way to link up a number of “things” that seem to have some kind of digital dependency.

Sharing and exploring practice is pretty much at the forefront of everything I’m doing just now. Although I consider myself an open practitioner, and an advocate for open educational practices, I am aware that my own practices, my networks and connections are changing in response to my new position. As you’ll be aware, dear reader, it’s Open Education week next week. David Walker has organised a brilliant week of events at Sussex. I’m delighted to have been given the opportunity to run a webinar with Catherine Cronin about the challenges of being open. The title of our session is “Open and online: connections, community and reality” and I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts and experiences along with Catherine’s research on openness, identities and online spaces.

I’ll also be blogging more about this next week and using the responses to my twitter question

Tweeps do you think I am an open practitioner? Your response will help me with a couple of things for open education week

— Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) March 5, 2014

In the meantime tho, my good friend and former Cetis colleague David Sherlock has written a really thought provoking post in response to my tweet, which takes a different angle on sharing, data and who really benefits.

Random picture of a bit of welcome sunshine earlier this week.

What Sheila's seen this week – open boat building, secret wikipedians, NMC report

This has been a bit of a meeting-tastic week for me, and so most of my time has been taken up with internal developments here at GCU. All quite exciting for me but not so much in terms of a blog post. However I still have had half an eye on the rest of the world, well parts of it at least.

On Monday I went to the 3rd Open Data Glasgow Meet up. As one of community organisers is was heartening to see a core of regulars building up, and of course welcome new faces. The presentations were as diverse as ever from using wikipedia for developing research and scholarly skills at the Glasgow School of Art, where a number of secret wikipedians have been ‘outed’; to using open source designs and 3-D printers to build boat houses in the Hebrides. Added to this mix was a touch of open science and another up date from the Glasgow Future Cities demonstrator Project. I collated a twitter time line of the event which gives an overview of the presentations.

The NMC HE Horizon report was released. I’m not even going to attempt to review it (David Hopkins has done a great round up of reviews), but I can easily match most of the key trends, significant challenges and important developments to activities and/or areas in need of development within my own institution. I still have reservations the relevance of big data approaches in assessment in my context at this point in time. We are seeing a really big up take in e-assessment which is great. But it is going to take a while for the analytics side of things to become part and parcel of the emerging workflows/practices of our staff. At this stage, we need to a lot of work on developing (relatively) small and local approaches to data. We really are just taking baby steps in terms of actually getting the data in the first place never mind be in a position to make any sense of it. A more pressing priority just now is ensuring that e-assessment systems are reliable. As many of you know many of us in the UK HE sector are more than a little bit cross with certain well known similarity checking system.

Probably more interesting to me than the report were the video entries for the ELI video competition which show real examples of a number of the trends, challenges and developments from the report itself.

The HEA also released their flexible pedagogies report, which is a bit a contrast to the NMC report, but has some useful overview information in it.

Developing staff (and student) digital literacies were featured in the NMC and ALT ‘s Special Issue: Scholarship and Literacies in a Digital Age includes a fascinating range of papers around digital literacy issues – weekend reading for me I think.

Elements of the Creative Classroom Research Model - NMC HE 2014 — Elements of the Creative Classroom Research Model – NMC HE 2014

New learning analytics community, digital pedagogies, reasons to keep blogging: what sheila's seen this week

So this week I am no longer the newbie in our department as a new administrator joined us on Monday. I’m starting to feel more like I am part of the institution and am actually starting to make a contribution to things. I’ve submitted a bid for the HEA Challenges of Web Residency project, and it’s been great work with Evelyn McElhinney on that. Regardless of the outcome writing instead of reading bids has marked quite a sea change for me. Marion Kelt in our library is making great progress developing our institutional policy on OER and it was catch up on progress with the working group this week. I’ve also been involved in discussions around some other internal projects exploring potential new initiatives – hopefully more on that in the weeks to come.

As I’ve been thinking about some possible future directions, they serendipity of twitter brought me to this post from Christina Costa. Outlining a lecture she had given about teaching in the 21st century, Christina clearly outlines some of the key challenges and affordances of using technology effectively for learning and raises some key questions, but ends with this “Can digital technologies, and the philosophies of practice associated with it, finally deliver on the promise of critical pedagogies?” Just now I think the answer is sometimes, maybe . . .

I also spotted the website for the EU funded Learning Analytics Exchange Project (LACE). I’m hoping to be as track/be involved as much as I can with this. We’re really at the early days of learning analytics here at GCU so this could be a really useful place for us to get advice from others and start sharing and developing the key questions we want data and analytical approaches to help us answer.

Over the years I’ve really enjoyed blogging, and it certainly has paid off for me in terms of my career progression and other recognition. I start blogging from a non tradition academic post, and so my motivations weren’t academically driven. This post from Deborah Lupton gives a really balanced view of the pros and cons of academic blogging and the need for continued research into its impact and development of practice. As I become more and more engaged with institutional projects, and hopefully more “academically focused” (aka I need to write more papers) I can see my approach to blogging will also have to change. The upside is that should have more focus for my writing, but the downside is that I will have to be far more considered. Actually that’s not really a bad thing is it? But having the motivation to keep blogging is an issue. It’s one of the reasons I started the (almost) weekly posts. My old Cetis buddy David Sherlock sums up some of the practical “challenges” of blogging here including the importance of fun – which sadly is sometimes lacking in educational contexts.

Sometimes you can’t beat old technology, and this pen my colleague brought back from the Blackboard Conference last week in Durham has been useful for various notes this week too.

Meet the future – he's called Steve

picture of tin foil hat — tin foil hat time

(image: http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-74564p1.html)

I’ve just come across IBM’s 5 in 5 predictions for the next five years. A neat idea where they share their vision of in the future “everything will learn” and how their cognitive,cloud based systems will impact on five key areas:

I have really mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand,it is really exciting to see what would be deemed Star Trek technology actually becoming part of our daily lives. But on the other, particularly with the emphasis on big data and intelligent systems I am have some serious concerns about data ownership and use. Particularly by the digital guardian prediction, who in the accompanying video is turned into a ‘Men in Black’ type security agent, called Steve. Steve knows my habits so well he can predict my every move and detect any abnormal behaviour in my spending habits and so for example notify me of any abnormal behaviour in my bank account and so prevent online banking fraud. Hmm . . . actually I think even Steve might be a tad confused by my shopping habits but that’s another story.

So “the system” will keep me safe and secure. But who owns the system? What else are they going to do with my data? Who else will have access to it ? How can I set my privacy and notification levels? Who pays for all this? Who really benefits? The banks and business who want to know us all better to ~~sell us more stuff~~ personalise our everyday experiences? I’m not convinced it is such an obvious win win situation. I’m afraid this vision makes me want to put on my tin foil hat and not engage with the system the answers to these questions are more transparent.

Or as Mark Power put it (feel free to sing this part)

@sheilmcn “It sees you when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake…IBM Digital Guardian is coming…to toooown” #festive #tinfoil — Mark Power (@markpower) December 18, 2013

What Sheila's seen this week

In between meeting new colleagues, getting new laptop etc set up and generally finding my feet in my new job a couple of things have caught my eye this week.

Jisc announce a framework agreement for Google Apps for education. Cloud hosting can cause headaches for many institutions so this should help ease some of the issues around institutional provision of some of google’s popular services – particularly the collaborative ones such as docs and hangouts. I also came across this really useful guide to getting started with google apps in education from the University of Sheffield

The HEA and NUS Scotland launched their Learning Journeys report which “looks at students’ experiences of their ‘journeys’ through education in Scotland.” It highlights some key issues around student engagement and entry routes to higher education.

Whilst the BBC announced its drive to get everyone coding Google launched web designer, their wysiwyg HTML 5 editor.

There have also been an number of webinars this week that I haven’t managed to tune into live but hope to catch up with over the next couple of days

*OER Research Hub continued its webinar series with “Policies – the cause or effect of Open Education?” You can access the recording here.

*SoLAR’s Open Symposium: Policy and Strategy for Learning Analytics Deployment also got going this week – lots of interesting webinars to catch up on and perhaps even engage in the discussions.

And last but not least, blended learning is pretty high on my agenda now, so seeing the these tips for better blends and outline for a book on blended learning was pretty timely too.

Analytics in UK Further and Higher Education Survey

Over the past few months, we at Cetis have been involved in a number of analytics related activities, most notably our Analytics Series of papers and case studies. Although we know there are pockets of really exciting developments here in the UK, we are keen to find out more about what is actually happening in our Universities and Colleges. In order to give us (and the community) a more accurate insight we are launching our Analytics in UK Further and Higher Education survey. From teaching and learning to the library to registry and business intelligence, we need to hear from you!

The survey is quite short (12 questions) and has been designed to try and allow us to undertake a “lite” benchmark of activity in the UK sector. We’d really appreciate if you could take 10 minutes or so to give us your feedback. The survey will stay open until June 16. Once we have all the data we will of course publish the results. We will be sharing our initial analysis of the data at a session at this years ALT-C.

The survey can be accessed here, please feel free to pass the link on to any relevant colleagues.