Open Learning Analytics (OLA) Summit

Following LAK’14, SoLAR, Marist College, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison jointly held an Open Learning Analytics Summit in Indianapolis that brought together representatives from the learning analytics and open source software development fields to explore how open source communities can accelerate the potential of learning analytics to provide new tools for understanding and improving learning and teaching. One of the major outcomes of the Summit was the identification of a number of domains for future work by the OLA community. These include: open research (e.g. open datasets, open predictive models, etc.), institutional strategy and policy issues, learning sciences/learning design, and open standards/open-source software. Future face-to-face gatherings include informal meetings at the 2014 Open Apereo Conference in Miami, Florida (June 1–4, 2014), a series of community events in Europe organized by the Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE) project, and another major OLA Summit at LAK’15 (March 16-20, 2015) at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.