Data science: the new skillset for learning technologists

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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For all the talk of big data being the next big thing in learning technology, few people mention that in workplace learning there just aren’t any examples of big data to speak of. The data collected just isn’t at the same scale. However, big data has led to an explosion in data analysis tools and techniques that learning technologists can use in their work. Throughout 2014 I’ve been dipping into data science MOOCs, learning the basics of R programming, and thinking about how to apply this within learning and development. These are some of my initial thoughts and notes.

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What we can learn from the ephemeral web

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Learning Platforms have flourished in the past decade, and as they have scaled with the rise of MOOCs, the data inside them has also become increasingly valuable. Different people see different value in this data. Some want to analyse data to predict outcomes and trigger early interventions when needed. Others want to analyse large datasets to advance machine learning techniques. Many more just see dollar signs in anything related to ‘big data’ so, in true startup fashion, they start collecting huge quantities of learner data now in anticipation of monetising it later.

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Virtual College trademarks the term VOOC

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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A few times in recent months I’ve had a new MOOC term pass through my Twitter feed.  We haven’t had a new MOOC spin-off acronym for a good 6 months. I don’t know what’s happened to the edtech marketers, maybe they’ve been off on holiday on their new yachts spending all those edtech venture capital billions. Anyway, after a quiet start to 2014, we finally have a new buzzword to get excited about: VOOCs. Yay!

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Moodling around in Edinburgh

Reading Time: 9 minutes

It was great to be at the UK MoodleMoot in Edinburgh this week. It has become an annual highlight for me as a place to meet old and new friends alike, to share some of the things we’ve been working on and to learn from the vast experiences of the Moodle community around the UK and wider afield. The event ran over four days but myself and Andrew Downes went up for the two conference days, along with a whopping 400 delegates from 29 countries.

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Is Google Glass failing our children?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Following on from my initial exploration of Google Glass, I was keen to see what my kids would make of this device. As anyone who has seen a toddler using an iPad will know, some technology is just so intuitive that kids take to it like a duck to water. So I wondered what challenges Glass would throw up for a child, whether they would reflect my own challenges and frustrations in getting familiar with this device. After all, I had to undo decades of engrained user interface practice, whereas my daughter only had a few years of computing under her belt. Sharing Google Glass with my daughter turned out to be just as exciting and eye opening as I had hoped, but what really surprised me was the rather sobering reflection it led to, about just what kind of future we are leading our children towards.

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Getting to know Google Glass

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A colleague at Epic is part of the Glass Explorer programme, and this weekend I was pleased to be able to take a Google Glass home to learn and experiment with. We took the device up to the LT14 show last week and it was a bit of a draw on the stand and was great to introduce people to this new world of wearable technology.

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Building bridges between Higher Education and Corporate L&D

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I came across this nice line from my old boss Donald Clark’s blog recently: “Much as Higher Education would like to think it has a monopoly on learning, it is merely one in many, many layers in the learning cake.”

True words and they got me thinking about some experiences good and bad, past and present, that I have had as a learning and development professional interacting with the Higher Education world from the ‘outside’.

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Top ten learning platform trends from 2013

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The end of the calendar year is a great opportunity to reflect and take stock of some of the key trends in the learning platforms market that have stood out for me and the team at Epic over the past 12 months. Do these reflect your own views of the market? What was big for you last year? Let me know in the comments, it would be great to share thoughts and notes on what was a fast moving year!

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MoodleBrighton December 2013 – Exploring Moodle 2.6

Reading Time: 4 minutes

After a lapse of several months we finally had a MoodleBrighton meetup last week. It was good to see everyone again and to catch up on what’s been going on, and we had a couple of new faces too. It was a good session, loosely based around an exploration of Moodle 2.6 with attendees coming from Sussex Uni, Brighton Uni, Moodlerooms and Epic.

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The art of writing LMS requirements

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I saw a really well constructed Request for Proposal this week. It was about 10 pages long and listed a set of business requirements and a set of technical requirements for an LMS, without being overly prescriptive about the specifics of how the system should operate. I work on responses to a lot of these and was nice to see one that was so well written.

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