May 2015 – Open Thoughts

As learning analytics continues to rise up the agenda in the corporate learning & development (L&D) sector, one thing is becoming glaringly apparent: we should not expect a one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf approach to learning analytics. This is a specialist discipline that cannot be bottled up into a single product. Sure, there are products such as Knewton, a Product as a Service platform used to power other peoples’ tools. There are also LMS bolt-ons like Desire2Learn Insights or Blackboard Analytics but even they are not sold as off-the-shelf products, for example the Blackboard team “tailors each solution to your unique institutional profile”. There are just far too many organisational factors at play for an L&D practitioner to be able to implement a learning analytics programme using an off-the-shelf tool.

What a learning analytics platform looks like

OUAnalyse An example of one platform (not a commercially available product but probably the most advanced learning analytics platform I’ve yet seen) is the Open University’s OU Analyse platform. They demonstrated this at MoodleMoot UK and Ireland recently. The product is very geared to the OU’s own Moodle-based VLE and as such is built to answer their own questions. This predictive analytics platform analyses demographic and course data from their own VLE with a view to predicting which students are likely to fail. Tutors have a login to the system and can use the dashboard tools to determine which learning interventions to recommend to a student in order to get them back on a path to success.

Continue reading “Building a learning analytics platform”

This year was my fourth Moot and it was another cracking event. Dublin is a welcoming and accessible location so it was good to be back here. I attended the two conference days on May 12-13, but the conference was topped and tailed by a workshops day on the 11th and a developer hackfest on the 14th.

First ever workplace learning stream

Of particular interest for me was that for the first time the conference featured a workplace learning stream. Despite Moodle topping multiple surveys of the the most widely used workplace LMSes, previous Moots have typically been dominated by the education sector. It’s great to see the focus gradually shift and the conference become more representative of real world Moodle users. It was nice to hear Moodle HQ presenters reinforce that future Moots would be structured along similar lines.

The workplace stream consisted of case studies from:

Civil Service Learning
University Hospital Southampton
Health and Safety Authority
An Irish law company
A US Healthcare company

There was also a good analysis of the business impact of long term support vs yearly upgrades from the conference organiser, Gavin Henrick. The workplace stream was well attended, and I look forward to more of the same in future years! Continue reading “MoodleMoot 2015 Review”