October 7, 2019
SoLAR is happy to announce a new webinar series in conjunction with the Learning Analytics podcast, SoLAR Spotlight. The webinar series will provide a bi-monthly webinar on the months where there is no podcast episode. For the month of August, we were happy to feature, Dr. Professor Simon Buckingham Shum from the University of Technology Sydney titled, “Learning Analytics as Educational Knowledge Infrastructure.” With close to 100 participants registered, we are excited to continue to offer webinars bi-monthly from different parts of the world to allow our participants and community members to listen in live from different time zones spanning the globe.
If you missed our first webinar, here is the replay – “Learning Analytics as Educational Knowledge Infrastructure” on our YouTube Channel. PDF slides available.
Next Up: Webinar #2: “Designing Learning Analytics for Humans with Humans” with Professor Alyssa Wise from New York University – Wednesday, October 16, 12:00pm to 1:00pm Eastern Time.
Abstract:
Learning analytics (LA) is a technology for enabling better decision-making by teachers, students, and other educational stakeholders by providing them with timely and actionable information about learning-in-process on an ongoing basis. To be effective LA tools must thus not only be technically robust but also designed to support use by real people. One powerful strategy for achieving this goal is to involve those who will (hopefully!) use the learning analytics in their design. This can be done by observing existing (pre-analytic) teaching and learning practices, gathering information from intended users, or directly engaging them in participatory design. Such attention to people and context contributes to the development of Human-Centered Learning Analytics (see the recent special section in JLA 6(2)).
In this webinar, I’ll present a diverse set of examples of the ways that NYU’s Learning Analytics Research Network (NYU-LEARN) is including educators and students in the process of building and implementing learning analytics. We’ll look at examples of how to: involve students in the creation and revision of learning analytics solutions for their own use; work with instructors to align analytically available metrics with valued course pedagogy; and partner with an educational team to design and implement interventions based on at-risk students predictions. Webinar attendees will gain a sense of both the conceptual issues and practical concerns involved in designing learning analytics for humans with humans.
All webinar recordings will be made available on our official Youtube channel.