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We use administrative data to estimate the effect of neighbourhood composition on teenagers' educational and behavioural outcomes in England. We exploit a unique research design based on changes over time in neighbourhood composition experienced by residentially immobile students, where these changes arise purely through residential migration among other students in our data set. The complete coverage of our data allows investigating heterogeneity and non-linearities in the effect of neighbourhood composition at an unprecedented level. Our results show that changes in neighbourhood composition have no effects on test scores but some effects on behavioural outcomes, which are heterogeneous for boys and girls

"The Open University has collected and analysed student data as a means of providing information relating to student support and retention for many years. The changing landscape of higher education has seen the rapid expansion of uses to which student data is put. The Open University, in common with many other higher education institutions, is now looking at its use of learning analytics."

Community Maps. It provides access to maps generated from data sourced from a range of social and technical data providers. Data providers include: Experian, Point Topic, the University of Essex, Connection Services Ltd, UK online centres, University Coll

How to Protect Your Data in the Event of a Webapp Shutdown (and Prevent the Problem in the Future)

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."

The purpose of this study was to explore group forming strategies by examining participation behaviours during whole class discussions associated with active participation in a following small group activity. Written communication data, posted in class discussion forums (843 messages/70,432 words) and small group forums (732 messages/59,394 words), were analyzed quantitatively. The result indicated that individuals' participation quantity in small groups was significantly correlated with their own participation behaviour in whole class discussions. Also, a significant portion of small group participation was explained by their group members' participation (i.e., group member effect). Based on the results, we suggest instructors use the information of participation behaviours during the initial period of whole class activities for allocating students into small groups heterogeneously.

This site contains guidance material aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording or patient data for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are made available for learning and teaching. Learn about the ethical principles that underpin the guidelines.

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data? - No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company wher

This study investigated the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) use on teaching and learning. To achieve this, the project team reviewed current research in the area; surveyed, interviewed and ran workshops with suitable participants to collect dat

"This study investigated the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) use on teaching and learning. To achieve this, the project team reviewed current research in the area; surveyed, interviewed and ran workshops with suitable participants to collect data; and produced an accessible report on the study findings. The report considered the use of OER from both an individual and institutional perspective looking at the benefits OER can offer each and identifying the pedagogic, attitudinal, logistical and strategic factors conducive to uptake and sustained use of OER, as well as the associated issues and challenges." Video, "accessible" report and full report available. Cited on Paul's e-Learning Resources https://sites.google.com/site/technologyenhancedlearning/home/the-resources/open-educational-resources-oer

The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet". Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will

Mozilla has updated Weave, its free add-on for Firefox that lets you synchronize all your personal data across the various Firefox installations you have running on your work PC, your home PCs and your mobile phone. This latest update to Weave (now at ver

"he MOOC space essentially doubled this year. More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years of the "modern" MOOC movement (which started in late 2011-when the first Stanford MOOCs took off). According to data collected by Class Central, the total number of students who signed up for at least one course has crossed 35 million-up from an estimated 16-18 million last year."

"In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into how participants' usage and perception of social media in their online learning experiences differed and why. We identified that, although some participants benefitted from social media by crediting it, for example, with networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, others objected or refused to engage with social media, perceiving it as a waste of their time. We make recommendations for the usage of social media for educational purposes within MOOCs and formal digital learning environments."