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"SYDNEY LEARNING ANALYTICS RESEARCH GROUP About The Sydney Learning Analytics Research Group (LARG) is a joint venture of the newly established Quality and Analytics Group within the Education Portfolio, and the new Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation connected to the Faculty of Education and Social Work. The key purposes in establishing the new research group are: Capacity building in learning analytics for the benefit of the institution, its students and staff To generate interest and expertise in learning analytics at the University, and build a new network of research colleagues To build a profile for the University of Sydney as a national and international leader in learning analytics LARG was launched at ALASI in late November 2015. The leadership team is actively planning now for the 2016 calendar year and beyond, with several community-building initiatives already in the pipeline, the first being a lecture by George Siemens, and the second is a new conference travel grant (see details below)."

Flare at Purdue in October    Hi everyone. Can someone provide more information for the upcoming SoLAR FLARE event at Purdue in October? Thanks, Kelvin Bentley By Kelvin Bentley  - May 14 - 2 new of 2 messages - Report as spam     EDUCAUSE Survey on Analytics - Looking for International Input    Colleagues, EDUCAUSE is soliciting input on analytics in higher education. They have currently sent email to their current members, but are looking for additional participation from the international community. We would greatly appreciate if you could complete the survey below. -- john... more » By John Campbell - Purdue  - May 11 - 2 new of 2 messages - Report as spam     CFP: #Influence12: Symposium & Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media    Hi Everyone, If you are interested in Learning Analytics and Social Media, I invite you to submit a short position paper or poster to the Symposium & Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media. The event is set for September 28-29, 2012 in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. All submissions are due *June 15, 2012*.... more » By Anatoliy Gruzd  - May 11 - 2 new of 2 messages - Report as spam     LA beginnings    Learning Analytics isn't really new, it is just getting more publicity now as a result of the buzz word name change. Institutions have been collecting data about students for a long time, but only a few people dealt with the data. Instructors kept gradebooks and many tracked student progress locally - by hand. What's new about Learning... more »

About Cohere The Web is about IDEAS+PEOPLE. Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Back them up with websites. Support or challenge them. Embed them to spread virally. Discover who - literally - connects with your thinking. Publish ideas and optionally add relevant websites Weave webs of meaningful connections between ideas: your own and the world's Discover new ideas and people We experience the information ocean as streams of media fragments, flowing past us in every modality. To make sense of these, learners, researchers and analysts must organise them into coherent patterns. Cohere is an idea management tool for you to annotate URLs with ideas, and weave meaningful connections between ideas for personal, team or social use. Key Features Annotate a URL with any number of Ideas, or vice-versa. Visualize your network as it grows Make connections between your Ideas, or Ideas that anyone else has made public or shared with you via a common Group Use Groups to organise your Ideas and Connections by project, and to manage access-rights Import your data as RSS feeds (eg. bookmarks or blog posts), to convert them to Ideas, ready for connecting Use the RESTful API services to query, edit and mashup data from other tools Learn More Subscribe to our Blog to track developments as they happen. Read this article to learn more about the design of Cohere to support dialogue and debate.

"Built as a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration for the learning management system Canvas, Threadz is a discussion visualization tool that adds graphs and statistics to online discussions. Online discussions provide valuable information about the dynamics of a course and its constituents. Much of this information is found within the content of the posts, but other elements are hidden within the social network connection and interactions between students and between students and instructors. Threadz is a tool that extracts this hidden information and puts it on display. The visual representations created from social network connections and interactions between students and instructors in a discussion assist in identifying specific behaviors and characteristics within the course, such as: learner isolation, non-integrated groups, instructor-centric discussions, and key integration (power) users and groups. By identifying these behaviors and characteristics, the instructor can affect change in these interactions to help make the discussions and classroom discourse more accessible to all."

George Siemens's PPT at ELI focus group

Drawing on sociocultural discourse analysis and argumentation theory, we motivate a focus on learners' discourse as a promising site for identifying patterns of activity which correspond to meaningful learning and knowledge construction. However, software platforms must gain access to qualitative information about the rhetorical dimensions to discourse contributions to enable such analytics. This is difficult to extract from naturally occurring text, but the emergence of more-structured annotation and deliberation platforms for learning makes such information available. Using the Cohere web application as a research vehicle, we present examples of analytics at the level of individual learners and groups, showing conceptual and social network patterns, which we propose as indicators of meaningful learning.

Satisfaction and its discontents 8 March 2012 The National Student Survey puts pressure on lecturers to provide 'enhanced' experiences. But, argues Frank Furedi, the results do not measure educational quality and the process infantilises students and corrodes academic integrity One of the striking features of a highly centralised system of higher education, such as that of the UK, is that the introduction of new targets and modifications to the quality assurance framework can have a dramatic impact in a very short space of time. When the National Student Survey was introduced in 2005, few colleagues imagined that, just several years down the road, finessing and managing its implementation would require the employment of an entirely new group of quality-assurance operatives. At the time, the NSS was seen by many as a relatively pointless public-relations exercise that would have only a minimal effect on academics' lives. It is unlikely that even its advocates would have expected the NSS to acquire a life of its own and become one of the most powerful influences on the form and nature of the work done in universities.

"Rethinking Educaitonal Leadership: mapping the terrain of leadership in learning organisations in conditions of complexity, diversity and change Jul 26 2015 0 Rethinking Educational Leadership: an Open Space Symposium The purpose Symposium was to provide experienced practitioners and researchers with an opportunity to bring fresh thinking to the current challenges facing school leaders and to generate new ideas about leadership development. The Open Space Technology provided a means of capturing the collective intelligence generated by the group in response to the core question. This post reports on the outcomes of this Open Space Symposium which was held in 2013. "

"Accrediting associations have expectations that call on institutions to collect and use evidence of student learning outcomes at the programmatic and institutional to confirm and improve student learning.  This section of the NILOA website lists both regional accrediting associations and specialized or programmatic accrediting organizations along with links to those groups."

Assessment and analytics, supported by information technology, can change institutional culture and drive the transformation in student retention, graduation, and success. U.S. higher education has an extraordinary record of accomplishment in preparing students for leadership, in serving as a wellspring of research and creative endeavor, and in providing public service. Despite this success, colleges and universities are facing an unprecedented set of challenges. To maintain the country's global preeminence, those of us in higher education are being called on to expand the number of students we educate, increase the proportion of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and address the pervasive and long-standing underrepresentation of minorities who earn college degrees-all at a time when budgets are being reduced and questions about institutional efficiency and effectiveness are being raised.

National Survey of Student Engagement What is student engagement? Student engagement represents two critical features of collegiate quality. The first is the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities. The second is how the institution deploys its resources and organizes the curriculum and other learning opportunities to get students to participate in activities that decades of research studies show are linked to student learning. What does NSSE do? Through its student survey, The College Student Report, NSSE annually collects information at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about student participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college. NSSE provides participating institutions a variety of reports that compare their students' responses with those of students at self-selected groups of comparison institutions. Comparisons are available for individual survey questions and the five NSSE Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice. Each November, NSSE also publishes its Annual Results, which reports topical research and trends in student engagement results. NSSE researchers also present and publish research findings throughout the year.

A unified framework for multi-level analysis of distributed learning Full Text: PDF Authors: Daniel Suthers University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI Devan Rosen School of Communications, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY Learning and knowledge creation is often distributed across multiple media and sites in networked environments. Traces of such activity may be fragmented across multiple logs and may not match analytic needs. As a result, the coherence of distributed interaction and emergent phenomena are analytically cloaked. Understanding distributed learning and knowledge creation requires multi-level analysis of the situated accomplishments of individuals and small groups and of how this local activity gives rise to larger phenomena in a network. We have developed an abstract transcript representation that provides a unified analytic artifact of distributed activity, and an analytic hierarchy that supports multiple levels of analysis. Log files are abstracted to directed graphs that record observed relationships (contingencies) between events, which may be interpreted as evidence of interaction and other influences between actors. Contingency graphs are further abstracted to two-mode directed graphs that record how associations between actors are mediated by digital artifacts and summarize sequential patterns of interaction. Transitive closure of these associograms creates sociograms, to which existing network analytic techniques may be applied, yielding aggregate results that can then be interpreted by reference to the other levels of analysis. We discuss how the analytic hierarchy bridges between levels of analysis and theory.