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Is it really all about the deal?

We are now truly in the post-truth era. With Brexit becoming a reality and today’s inauguration of “the Donald”, we are also firmly in the age of ‘’the deal’.

Life, democracy, world peace, nuclear weapons, courgettes – everything we know is about doing deals. Just how these deals will pan out remains to be seen. Britain may be “open for business” and ready to do deals; the new US Presidency may be headed by a self proclaimed King of the deal. But from where I’m sitting I am very skeptical about both.

Deals are about about negotiation. Call me crazy, but I’m just not convinced the business aka bullying tactics of the boardroom are really appropriate for nuclear arms negotiations for example. Similarly vacuous soundbites from Mrs May do not really convince me of any strong negotiation position for the UK with the EU and the rest of the world.

But she needs to walk the deal maker walk. The image of the deal maker is all to often associated with stereotypical (male ) power and imho bullying tactics. More than ever the deals will spun to suit to political ends and egos. Winning, or the perception of winning, will be all important.

So where does this leave us in education? Will we need to embrace ‘the deal’ in new ways? What negotiation tactics can we employ to ensure our future? Consolation which is all were are really offered by governments around any major change in our provision, structure and funding is not negotiation.

Negotiated Learning is not new, it quite rightly permeates many of our university level programmes. Education should always be a negotiated process. Education is not about telling people what to do or what to think. Equally it can’t all be customer driven. Part of the joy of being a student is actually not knowing what you need to know. But you don’t realise that until well after you finished particularly any formal education.

Education is about providing learning environments that support engagement and foster confidence, understanding, knowledge sharing, extension and growth. But that’s really hard to measure. It’s hard to broker a deal based on fuzzy stuff (hello TEF). Easier to tell universities, schools what they need to measure, produce some league tables, give out some medals and let the politicians do their deals.

It’s really hard to know what do write, or say today of all days, maybe this is the start of the end of days. But I do think what we can and should do as educators is to help empower everyone in our society to articulate and understand the process of negotiation. To question bland, meaningless statements made by politicians, to demand evidence not “gut instinct”. Most of all we can’t be silent we need to be able to bring the deal makers to task and make sure that the are constantly engaged in meaningful negotiations with us, the electorate.

I still don’t understand what the Brexit deal is for the UK – a direct result of the failure from both sides during the referendum to engage effectively and meaningfully with the electorate. Just now all I can see is a few people wanting more of something from the past, but leaving the rest of us with less than we had for the future.

Pre #bydo4l reflections on twitter, Trump and why I'm not leaving social media

I’m getting ready for the week long social media frenzy that is #BYOD4L (bring your own device for learning). This is the 5th iteration of the open, online course and as it’s evolved, it’s becoming less about devices and more about general effective use of technology within in education. As I’ve blogged about before, I really enjoy #byod4l and the effective way it brings people together to share practice. As Chris Jobling has done it’s a great way to reflect on how your own use of technology has evolved.

Sunday is one of the few days that I buy an actual newspaper. I tend to consume most of my news online now. Today I saw a couple of articles about digital detoxes, and people leaving social media. These were alongside articles about the President Elect of the USA, and of course you can’t talk about him without at least a passing reference to twitter.

I doubt that when Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass were developing twitter, they never, in their wildest dreams, imagined that there would come a point where their fledgling idea would become the main communication channel for a President of the United States.

The at times, bizarre and incoherent stream of consciousness from the President elect illustrates (imho) the antithesis of everything I use twitter for. It’s Broadcast Mode (with deliberate capitalisation), uncensored, offensive . . . So whilst I’m not wanting in anyway to compare myself to or with “The Donald”, his use of twitter does illustrate why many people are turning off the service.

A few years ago, when twitter was new and shiny and free from advertising and obvious megalomania, when I was explaining its use to people I often used to say “you can’t really understand it or see the point of it until you use it”. Making and sustaining connections – and yes, I’ll admit in the beginning there was a bit of thrill (or as the wonderful @ambrouk called in “vanalytics “) watching how many followers I seemed to be amassing.

BYOD4L is a clear illustration of the power of twitter as an an educational tool/technology. It’s free and easy to use, (in the beginning) community driven by for example #hashtags, the conventions of RTs, @ messages, acknowledgements etc.

It allowed us to use SNA to understand our community engagement in ways we hadn’t been able to before (take a bow @mhawksey for inventing the wonderful Tags Explorer visualisation tool). It allows us to save and share all kinds of “stuff”. I am still amazed at how articulate (some) people can be in 140 characters. It allows use to connect and sustain networks, which to me has been and still is the most powerful aspect of twitter for me.

Having been one of the early adopters, my use of twitter has settled from the first thrills of always checking, always sharing to the realisation that twitter was for me mainly a work tool so I should step away from it after work, at the weekends etc.

I guess I’ve been quite lucky in that my use of twitter has always had a clear professional purpose. Once I started using it I easily started making connections and found a clear rationale for using it. The personal benefits ( for example the Eurovision Song Contest is lifted to a whole other level via the twitter backchannel), have always been a bit of an add on.

I’ve never gone on twitter just to broadcast (though i do confess to a certain level of “shameless self promotion” through sharing links to my blog posts, presentations etc), I don’t go on to fight with people or deliberately be offensive/aggressive/obtuse . I’ve had some great conversations. I’ve also been very fortunate in that I haven’t been trolled. I’ve only had a couple of abusive messages. I am very aware of the bubble I exist in, and I am thankful for it.

So whilst I can see that many people now find the adverts, the aggression, the trolling, the broadcast (as opposed to engaged mode that I prefer) mode of delivery, it still works for me. Today I had a lovely exchange of twitter with some colleagues (@carolak @sharonflynn, @catherinecronin) I would never have known, or benefited from the sharing of their work without twitter.

I’m not giving that up just because “the Donald” is around. I won’t let him take that away from me.

#BYOD4L – a story of personal and professional needs and wants

It’s only 10 days ’til the next iteration of Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#byod4l). Once again, along with Alex Spiers and Neil Withnell I’m facilitating the week long open event ably assisted with a team of volunteer mentors.

Now I have to confess, I love BYOD4L. I love the madness of the nightly tweet chats, the sharing of practice and ideas in people’s blogs, google+, in fact all over the interweb. But harking back to my last blog post about needs and want, although BYOD4L gives me an opportunity to do many things I want to do, is it really something I need to do?

I would say the answer is categorically yes. Although this is an open, social, informal, collaborative (with a sprinkling of badges) experience it also has provided me, my department, my colleagues, my institution with an space to allow people to experiment and experience a short blast of online collaboration and learning. In terms of staff development, BYOD4L has allowed us to augment the 5c model with informal drop in sessions where we can have more contextualised discussions about practice and experiences. In addition to the 5c model that BYOD4L uses, I think there is another C that this engenders – confidence. If you haven’t tweeted before, haven’t used Google+, have no idea how or what a tweet chat is, it’s a great (and safe) place to start. You don’t have to say anything – just experience the structure, pace and interactions. I know a number of my colleagues have done this and it has given them the confidence to start to use twitter in their teaching practice.

It is really hard to unpack what the impact of the tweet chats are. We do curate every one via storify, but it there are pretty big. However, as I facilitator I can see that there are many really interesting conversations happening. This year we are encouraging people to try and do a bit of their own more reflective curation and creating by way of telling their own byod4l story. That could be in any form – a smaller storify with a bit more context or what happened next, a blog post, an image, a video, a periscope.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly it will hopefully help to unpack the experience. We hope that more smaller digital stories, swill be really valuable in terms of open collaboration and sharing. Secondly, we hope that these vignettes of experience and practice will help people in terms of more formal CPD opportunities. I have very much tried to document and reflect on my BYOD4L experiences (mainly through my blog) and this has been invaluable in terms of having evidence for both my HEA Fellow and CMALT applications.

So to get the ball rolling so to speak, here is my #BYOD4l story so far (created with Sutori). Just click on the image to see the full version.

2016, the year of what you want and 2017 the year of what you need?

Having successfully switched off from work for almost 2 weeks, and as it’s Hogmanay I thought it timely to post a quick final 2016 post. I have been trying to think of my 2016 highs and lows, but to be honest I really don’t have the energy or inclination to trawl back through the year. But I do want to thank you, dear reader for taking the time to read my little rants over the year.

Watching/reading and listening to the plethora of yearly round ups, I keep being reminded of something a documentary producer and former boss once said to me. He said, “the trick is to give them what they need, not what they want.” It’s probably been one of the most useful things anyone has ever said to me. Finding out what people need, as opposed to what they say they want has been something I’ve spent most of my professional life doing.

In 2016 the Brexit and Trump results were examples of people voting for what (they thought) they wanted, and politicians and pundits riding an easy rhetoric to appear to be giving people what they wanted but not actually explaining how they would bring about the kind of change that is really needed. The markets are happy just now, but how long will that last? The complications of Brexit haven’t even begun to be understood. The impact of the USA being run like a business (and a business from somewhere in the mid 20th century by the sounds of things) is probably not actually what the “real” people of the USA need.

I had a bizarre experience this week when listening to former Cabinet Minister Michael Gove explaining his statement about not trusting experts. Apparently what he actually meant was that there should have been more rigorous criticality of some of the claims that were made during the Brexit campaign. On that I can agree with him (another example of the madness of 2016 – agreeing even briefly with Gove!) . However I do think that he kind of missed the irony of his statement when referring to academics. Academics based their professional lives and reputation on criticality and rigorous review.

So my new year’s wish is that everyone starts to take a bit of time to engage with trying to understand what it is we all need, be that around climate change, how to sustain our health and (national) health service, education, the role of the UN, international diplomacy, Brexit, and trying to raise the level of public debate and critical questioning of the things that really matter in life. Digital literacy, engagement and participation are going to be key to ensure that we can all do that. But in the meantime I’ll leave you with Mick and the boys to give you a little bit of what you might not either want nor need.

My idea for a marvelous,mechanical, post-truth, gaslighting, Trump-checking app/mash-up/service

A bit of a mad Sunday afternoon post inspired by the Teen Vogue Gaslighting article that has been doing the rounds on my newsfeed this weekend.

We need to do more fact checking. President Elect Trump needs to start getting some facts right, but in this post truth age, we can’t rely on human experts – what do they know? So I have had “a really great idea” (if I say it three times, a la The Donald, then it will be true), a really great idea, a really great idea.

I’m not sure if this is an app/mash-up/ service/iftt recipe but it goes something like this: The Donald speaks, some type of shazam like service records the words, and automagically some AI (note my point above about not using experts) like IBM Watson does some super clever checking of facts (remember this is my fantasy so the algorithms are you know, actually based on facts, and adapt to include more facts – not Trump-isms), the then produces a fact score -with a percentage and some links to the facts, which is then retweeted to the @realdonaldtrump twitter account, and of course anyone else who wants to subscribe to the service. The only way to get a higher score is to get some real facts. The drawing below illustrates.

Screen Shot 2016-12-11 at 4.35.51 pm.png

Anyway, crazy Sunday idea, but if anyone wants to build this, then I would for one would sign up, contribute to a crowd fund to build and keep it going.

Reasons to be cheerful – #altc , and the rest

Let’s face it 2016 hasn’t had too much to be jolly about, but this week during the #altc winter online conference I was reminded of the some of the good things in my professional life so I thought I’d take five minutes and not rant.

During the open session on ALTs future strategy there was a quite a bit of discussion about the support ALT has, and continues to, offer around professional development. As I participated (well, waffled might be more accurate) in the discussion, I was reflecting on my own career development and thinking about how I got started in the “crazy” world of learning technology. It was unplanned, unexpected but totally the right thing for me.

Like many of my contemporaries, I just sort of fell into a newly developing field. When I got a job as Learning Technologist, nobody (including me and my employer) really knew what a learning technologist was. However, I did have a very supportive boss who encouraged me to make the role my own. I will be forever thankful to Jackie Graham for giving me that opportunity.

Lots of my contemporaries have similar stories, or were working in disciplines where they saw the potential for technology to make a real difference to learning. Making that difference to learning was the key to all of us, where ever we came from.

We were all a bit different, experimental – long before edupunks were even thought of. I think most importantly we were willing to fail (partly because back in the day “stuff” just didn’t work very well) and laugh with and at ourselves. We often forget to acknowledge the role of fun in learning and career development.

That diversity of backgrounds is one of the things I still cherish. I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with so many clever people from such a wide range of academic disciplines, and they have all accepted me and valued my opinions, and my work and in turn influenced my own development. Long may that continue.

So, I know it’s a bit schmaltzy , but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone (especially you, dear reader) I have worked with, and continue to work with. In these exceptionally unstable times, our communities, our networks will be need to be stronger than ever. In these physical and metaphorical dark days it’s good to remember that there are still some reasons to be cheerful.

Open sanctuary versus cyber security

The title of this post might be a bit misleading. It’s not a “fight” situation, or playing one of the other in black and white. This post is more about me trying to make sense of some “stuff” that has been churning around in my head for the past couple of weeks about my relationship with open education and openness in general. Doing our institutional cyber security training yesterday has helped give me a (sort of) focus for the post.

So, the last couple of months, in fact the whole of 2016 has been, to put it mildly, a bit of a funny old year. In the first of her annual ed tech review posts, Audrey Watters has (as ever) accurately summarised the feelings of so many of us regarding the loss of so much and so many.

Despite the corporate driven changes to many social media platforms, and in particular twitter, I have found solace after Brexit, after the US election, from many of my friends and colleagues and others who I don’t know, as they have expressed and shared their feelings. There are too many people to mention, but Martin, Lorna, and Helen spring to mind.

This open sharing helps keep me sane, helps me fight my despair around the post truth climate we all find ourselves in. I make no apologies for “my bubble”. I also know many people are moving to different places in protest at many aspects of social media platform management and data manipulation.

last week as I tried to follow the “cool kidz” into mastodon, I felt for the first time in a long time, isolated, unsure and really not at all comfortable in a social network -see this comment for more. Part of me wants to start an “occupy” movement in twitter, claim back our network, but I digress.

I’ve always, probably naively, tried to keep Politics our of my professional life. Dealing with internal politics has always been quite enough. But that’s no longer the case. Education, imho, has never been so Politcised. It’s never been so necessary for all of us in education to be so. We are where the fight back against post truth, the dismal of fact needs to be strongest.

The theme of OER17 – The Politics of Open will have even greater resonance than when it was first announced. Planning a contribution to the conference is where and when the notion of open sanctuary came to my mind.

I found it really hard to come up with anything to submit to the conference, and partly that was do with internal politics. Actually sharing some of the issues I perceive in my institution openly could potentially put me in a very difficult position.

During discussion for a fingers crossed successful workshop submission to the conference, with the wonderful Frances Bell and Viv Rolfe, they reassured my that I wasn’t alone. Our open networks allow us to reach out from the institutional madness, to inspire us to keep going and do our bit to support OEP and OER to grow within our own institutions. I’m still not articulating all of this very well, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

So yesterday I had to do my cyber security training. OMG, that’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back. Now, I’m not writing this to have a go at anyone involved in producing this. It’s all standard corporate training with the obligatory “high quality” videos and quizzes. But I have a real issue with this whole cyber security thang.

It’s all about closing things down, about corporate security, about platforms vying to place themselves as the most cyber secure cloud, about shutting down our civil liberties.

I realise there are serious issues “out there in cyber space” (and is it just me or does cyber space just sound scary?) around data, information management and access. But, particularly in a university setting instead of taking the (cyber) stick, padlock, lock down approach be thinking about empowerment? About developing digital capability and capacity?

Uncertainty causes fear (hello Mr Trump, Mrs May). Uncertainty causes people to make mistakes. If you are clear and confident about “stuff” you’re going to be able to make better judgements for example not to send exam marks via email. Instead of sitting through 2 hours of videos, wouldn’t it have been better to you know, try something different? Maybe a team based scenario where you had to deal with some major data breach that was (and this is crucial) relevant to your context? Maybe look at productive failure approach (as highlighted in this years OU Innovating Pedagogy report)

It’s easier to just push out corporate style training. Isn’t it ironic that in universities where we are supposed to extend notions of learning and teaching, we can’t see past standard corporate training for our staff? Another way to turn us off, to make us disengage, to make us fear the open, disengage from open practice, for the platforms to come in and take over?

My little bit of sanctuary . . .

Where Sheila's been this week: Inverness to Edinburgh#elesig, #ldcin, and delving into the digital university

Technically this post is a quick summary of where I was last week, I just didn’t quite get round to writing a post before the end of the week.

Last week I did a mini tour of Scotland, starting at UHI (the capital of the Highlands) Inverness for the ELESIG Scotland meeting and ending up on Friday in Edinburgh (the “other” capital) for the Learning Design Cross Institutional Network meeting. It was great to have a few days out of the office to catch up with colleagues and developments from across the Scotland and the rest of the UK.

The theme of Monday’s ELESIG meeting was that perennial favourite, Assessment and Feedback. David Walker (University of Sussex) provided a great start to the day with a very engaging, interactive and thought provoking keynote around driving change and challenging established assessment practice.

The rest of the day was a really good balance of presentations from across Scottish Universities around different approaches to changing assessment practice. Topics ranged from the use of wikis, to plagiarism in MOOCs, to assessment mapping to audio feedback. This storify gives an flavour of the discussions.

I stayed on in Inverness and on Tuesday morning with my colleague Bill Johnston we led a webinar around the questions of what is a digital university? This is a questions Bill, Keith Smyth (from UHI who hosted us) have been trying to answer for a number of years now. It was timely that a paper we wrote for SEDA last year about our work is now openly available. – hopefully next year this work will be extended into a book. You can catch up with the webinar here.

On Friday Fiona Hale and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh hosted the 4th Learning Design Cross Institutional Network. I was so pleased that this, the fourth meeting of the was being held in Edinburgh as it meant that I could actually attend in person and not remotely. This meeting was also much bigger that previous meetings. It was really pleasing to see around 40 colleagues coming together to talk about learning design in the lovely Dovecot which provided perhaps the tastiest sandwiches and pastries I have eaten all year!

I was delighted to share the approaches and methodologies we have been developing here at GCU.

GCU Approach to developing digital blended learning from Sheila MacNeill

Again this storify of the day gives a flavour of the discussions and activities. I was particularly interested in Mario Toro- Troconis (University of Liverpool) Course Design Sprint Framework and the associated activity cards which rather neatly map design approaches, Blooms taxonomy, tools, the UKPSF and Medical council descriptors. As these are available via CC licence this is something I hope to return to in a future post as I think this could be really useful for us to adapt and use here at GCU.

Sharing practice, ideas, frustrations, challenges is so important to staff development and actually to our well being. It’s all to easy to get caught up in the day to day of our own institutions. Now where is as challenging as our own institutions, right? But we all share common issues and can share common approaches to solutions. Getting a bit of external validation is also really important in times where institutional thanks/validation is increasingly hard to find. So it’s great that we are seeing more of these bottom up forums becoming more established.

A little ray of CMALT sunshine

It’s fair to say that in the last week or so there hasn’t been very much to celebrate. Many of us are still trying to come to terms with the result of the US presidential election, and the implications not just for the US but for the rest of us. However I did have a bit of good news this week. I finally achieved CMALT status (cue imaginary fireworks, carnival celebrations etc or make do with this gif).

I’ve had lots of lovely congratulatory messages, to which all I can say in addition to thank you, is “it’s about bloomin’ time.”

The CMALT portfolio is really a reflective exercise on your own practice, so I thought it might be worthwhile to share a short reflective post on my experiences of the process, as it did take me a while to actual get round to submitting.

I am to paraphrase one of my assessors, a “well kent face” in the ALT and UK learning technology community. I’m an ALT trustee, and a previous winner of Learning Technologist of the year. Whilst these are undoubtedly “good things” for me professionally, and didn’t just happen for no reason; they also highlight my inner struggle with imposter syndrome. I still have doubts around my work, my value, my academic ability etc. What if I failed ? Easier not to submit, or continually delay submission than go through that pain and embarrassment.

However I do regularly chastise myself about the imposter syndrome. I was determined to finish and submit my portfolio before the end of this year. The move to having set submission times really helpful in this respect as they provide the deadlines which we all need.

I had actually started thinking about my submission about 2 maybe 2 and a half years ago; around about the same time as I started on my portfolio submission for HEA fellowship. I thought I could do both simultaneously. I thought wrong. Pragmatically my HEA submission had to take precedent, and once it was done I just needed a bit of a rest. I was very fortunate in that both my work (who paid for the sumission) and ALT were very accommodating about letting me roll over submission opportunities.

There were a few colleagues at work who had decided to go for CMALT around the same time as me. As ever peer support was crucial in getting me motivated and focused. This year my colleague Lina Petrakieva was pivotal in this respect. This summer she booked a series of writing times in our calendars where we just took a couple of hours, talked things through and wrote. I had made a start on my portfolio in a first flush of enthusiasm about 18 months ago, but this summer I really got stuck in.

I also found attending one of the ALT webinars on getting started with CMALT really useful. I said there and I’ll say it here, getting started isn’t the problem, it’s finishing it that is! The webinar was great as it gave participants the chance to speak to a newly accredited member and an experienced assessor. It also illustrated some good/ not so good examples for each category, and just gave the opportunity to ask some questions about length, tone etc.

There is the option to ask for a preferred assessor, all submissions are double reviewed. Once person who has really helped me think about CMALT through his sharing of his own experiences is the fabulously generous David Hopkins (one of the best learning technologists in the business). If you are thinking about CMALT definitely check out David’s blog.

I had decided to go for the end of September submission, so at the ALT. conference I took the opportunity to ask David if he would be one of my assessors. During our chat David again was really helpful in terms of focus and thinking about the parts of the portfolio that are assessed and the parts that aren’t. With that in mind I actually made couple of videos of me explaining my contextual and future plans sections. They seemed to be more about me so it made sense to make them a bit more personal and not just text. ALT do share a google sites template, but you don’t have to use that. I did start out using it, and did change it a bit. But if I’m honest, I just didn’t really like it. So I presented my portfolio using Adobe Sparke. It just seemed a nicer UI, easier to read, and OK I’ll be honest a bit more swooshy – yes I am that shallow.

The feedback I received was really fair and helpful. I did end up making a final push right up to the wire and so didn’t get anyone to review it for me. If they had, they may have helped to pick up on some of the comments made. I wasn’t as reflective in parts as I c/should have been. I didn’t explain some things as clearly or as well as I c/should have. Despite these flaws, overall I made the grade and I was so happy when I got the email earlier this week telling me I had got it.

So if you are thinking about CMALT, or like me had started but just never seemed to be able to get round to finishing writing your portfolio, why not just block out some time and get back to it? Use all the resources that ALT and the CMALT community provide. Look at the portfolios in the repository, speak to people, but most of all, just do it. It’s really not that scary, and if you follow the guidance, and use the opportunity to reflect on what you do/have done, what impact it has had, what you have learned, then you too will be a CMALT holder my friend.

The day after the night before: thinking about data #codesign16

I’m writing this the morning after the night before the US 2016 election. What a day to be writing about data, and in this context learning analytics. The same thing happened to me earlier this year with the Brexit result, I was giving a keynote about learning analytics the day after that night too.

Once again the pollsters – even Nate Silver, the data, got it wrong. Those pesky people who weren’t on the data gathering radar went out and voted – and not in the way that the data predicted.

I don’t know if Facebook “called it” or not but there are some pretty big questions to be asked about the predictive algorithms being used for elections. What this all means is not something I’m going to talk about in this post (you might want to read this excellent response to the election result from Lorna Campbell in that respect), but I cannot not mention it today.

You may be aware that Jisc is running its codesign challenge just now and “how can we use data to improve teaching and learning” is on of their 6 challenges.

With both government and students focusing on value for money and a quality student experience, it is essential that universities and colleges are directing their resources appropriately to deliver the best learning experiences to students. Universities will need to draw on the vast array of data and information available not just to demonstrate the quality of their teaching for the TEF, but to examine what makes the most difference to students’ learning, employability and overall satisfaction with their experience, in order to continuously improve their offer. Fuller text about the challenge is at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/get-involved/how-can-we-use-data-to-improve-teaching-and-learning

Jisc have fielded a number of questions:

How are you currently using data to improve learning, teaching and student outcomes?
What would be the key questions about learning and teaching that you would like to see explored through data-driven approaches?
What data is needed in FE to better understand which aspects of course design and teaching lead to higher success rates for their learners?
How can a data-driven approach lead to improved quality and greater understanding of higher education, without risking losing its richness and diversity?
Should the UK HE offer be more strongly shaped by higher-level skills needs in the national and international economies?

Like many colleagues in the sector, I am trying to get a handle on our institutional analytics capabilities. I don’t really know what we want to do yet, but just have this feeling that there are indeed some “actionable insights” that we could get from a more systematic exploration and visualisation of our data that would help us in some way to address all of the questions above. However, before I can do that I have to overcome my biggest problem and that is actually getting at the data. I’ve blogged about this before and shared our experiences at this year’s ALT conference. It is still “a big issue.” As is consent, and increasingly, data processing agreements.

This is one area where I think Jisc could (and through the current effective learning analytics programme are beginning to) make a significant contribution to sectoral knowledge and understanding.

I worry about the lack of understanding and subsequent misunderstanding about secondary use of data; about multiple, varied DPA agreements between institutions and vendors, that may inadvertently forget about student consent, about the still unanswered question of who actually owns student data – is it institutions or the individual students? I know none of this is new, but it is still challenging.

I’m still very wary of predictive analytics, and the dangerous metrics and measurements that are being discussed as what can still only be seen as proxies for “student engagement” I couldn’t actually answer this question, it’s not a binary choice or even reality for me just now.

Would you rather use self-reported engagement data or recorded activity data to reflect student engagement in your teaching? #codesign16

— ruth drysdale (@RSDrysdale) November 8, 2016

However I do think have more insight into our data can help us in terms of our understanding. Understanding engagement is a huge task. Do we even have a clear understanding of what we mean by engagement? In TEF terms is this engagement and ergo success (passing) in assessments? Does this relate only to digital interactions, what about our offline engagement? How do we measure critical reflection, perhaps 5-10-30 years after leaving formal education?

One thing’s for sure today of all days we have seen how predictive data analysis has failed to measure human behaviour and engagement or lack of it.

That said I’m looking forward to the rest of the Jisc discussion as it unfolds. If you have any views then, please join the discussion using #codesign16 and this Friday (11th November) there is a tweet chat at 12.30 -1.30.

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