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Analytics: The Widening Divide By David Kiron, Rebecca Shockley, Nina Kruschwitz, Glenn Finch and Dr. Michael Haydock November 7, 2011 How companies are achieving competitive advantage through analytics IN THIS SECOND JOINT MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM Institute for Business Value study, we see a growing divide between those companies that, on one side, see the value of business analytics and are transforming themselves to take advantage of these newfound opportunities, and, on the other, that have yet to embrace them. Using insights gathered from more than 4,500 managers and executives, Analytics: The Widening Divide identifies three key competencies that enable organizations to build competitive advantage using analytics. Further, the study identifies two distinct paths that organizations travel while gaining analytic sophistication, and provides recommendations to accelerate organizations on their own paths to analytic transformation.

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.

"The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) tool performs real-time social network analysis and visualization of discussion forum activity within popular commercial and open source Learning Management Systems (LMS). SNAPP essentially serves as a diagnostic instrument, allowing teaching staff to evaluate student behavioral patterns against learning activity design objectives and intervene as required a timely manner. Valuable interaction data is stored within a discussion forum but from the default threaded display of messages it is difficult to determine the level and direction of activity between participants. SNAPP infers relationship ties from the post-reply data and renders a social network diagram below the forum thread. The social network visualization can be filtered based upon user activity and social network data can be exported for further analysis in NetDraw. SNAPP integrates seamlessly with a variety of Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Moodle and Desire2Learn) and must be triggered while a forum thread is displayed in a Web browser."

Theoretical and empirical evidence in the learning sciences substantiates the view that deep engagement in learning is a function of a complex combination of learners' identities, dispositions, values, attitudes and skills. When these are fragile, learners struggle to achieve their potential in conventional assessments, and critically, are not prepared for the novelty and complexity of the challenges they will meet in the workplace, and the many other spheres of life which require personal qualities such as resilience, critical thinking and collaboration skills. To date, the learning analytics research and development communities have not addressed how these complex concepts can be modelled and analysed, and how more traditional social science data analysis can support and be enhanced by learning analytics. We report progress in the design and implementation of learning analytics based on a research validated multidimensional construct termed "learning power". We describe, for the first time, a learning analytics infrastructure for gathering data at scale, managing stakeholder permissions, the range of analytics that it supports from real time summaries to exploratory research, and a particular visual analytic which has been shown to have demonstrable impact on learners. We conclude by summarising the ongoing research and development programme and identifying the challenges of integrating traditional social science research, with learning analytics and modelling.

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.

Simon Buckingham Shum Ruth Deakin Crick 2012 (In review) Theoretical and empirical evidence in the learning sciences  substantiates the view that deep engagement in learning is a  function of a  combination of learners' dispositions,  values,  attitudes and skills. When these are fragile, learners struggle to  achieve their potential in conventional assessments, and critically,  are not prepared for the novelty and complexity of the challenges  they will meet in the workplace, and the many other spheres of  life which require personal qualities such as resilience, critical  thinking and collaboration skills. To date, the learning analytics  research and development communities have not addressed how  these complex concepts can be modelled and analysed. We report  progress in the design and implementation of learning analytics  based on an empirically validated  multidimensional construct  termed  "learning power". We describe a  learning analytics  infrastructure  for gathering data at scale, managing stakeholder  permissions, the range of analytics that it supports from real time  summaries to exploratory research, and a particular visual analytic which has been shown to have demonstrable impact on learners.  We conclude by  summarising the ongoing research and  development programme.

Assessing learning dispositions/academic mindsets Mar 01 2014 2 A few years ago Ruth and I spent a couple of days with the remarkable Larry Rosenstock at High Tech High, and were blown away by the creativity and passion that he and his team bring to authentic learning. At that point they were just beginning to conceive the idea of a Graduate School of Education (er… run by a high school?!). Yes indeed. Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 16.56.56Now they're flying, running the Deeper Learning conference in a few weeks, and right now, the Deeper Learning MOOC [DLMOOC] is doing a great job of bringing practitioners and researchers together, and that's just from the perspective of someone on the edge who has only managed to replay the late night (in the UK) Hangouts and post a couple of stories. Huge thanks and congratulations to Larry, Rob Riordan and everyone else at High Tech High Grad School of Education, plus of course the other supporting organisations and funders who are making this happen. Here are two of my favourite sessions, in which we hear from students what it's like to be in schools where mindsets and authentic learning are taken seriously, and a panel of researcher/practitioners

"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."

"Connected Learning is a modern pedagogical approach holding that knowledge and learning is distributed across a social, conceptual network. It holds that when people forge, negotiate and nurture connections for themselves (between people, information, knowledge, ideas and concepts), learning is more powerful and sustainable. Ideally, such learning could happen anywhere. People would create Personal Learning Networks within a Community of Inquiry. They would use whatever tools they consider relevant to this process, and connect with whoever they consider relevant to their network... However, this open connectivism is difficult to achieve in our current educational paradigms. How can we help people to teach "in the wild"? Learning Management Systems maintain a dominant position in the education sector, which means that technical support is generally provided only for those teachers who choose safety over openness."

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.

"Guides Practices, research, and ideas to improve your people processes."

"What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team"