The sound of learning analytics #TalisInsight

I was invited to speak at the Learning Analytics Session at the TalisInsight conference earlier this week in Birmingham.  It was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my personal journey in learning analytics from being at the heart of some early work around horizon scanning and community engagement and awareness during my time at Cetis, to my current position where at GCU where I’m dealing with the realities of trying to get a learning analytics initiative up and running.

Although my presentation might have been slightly tongue in cheek, it can be very confusing to actually navigate around all the analytics options offered by practically every service these days.  There is still a lot of work to be done around figuring out what we are measuring and what actually has any influence on actual learning.  Just now I think at GCU we are very much at a baselining/housekeeping  stage. We need to get some information to help us see just what exactly is being used or not used and then start to delve more into the patterns that may be emerging.

It was useful to hear from Niall Scalter about the open analytics architecture work Jisc are developing.  This is something I will be exploring more with colleagues to see if that would be of use to us.

The panel session with Niall,  my former colleague Adam Cooper, and David White was also fun to be part of and I think we covered a lot of ground. I think a recording of the session will be available from Talis in the next few days.  In the meantime here are my slides.