«Let me see...: Analytics in Learning Environments»

Abstract

Nowadays technology is being used in an increasing number of aspects of learning experiences. Learning management systems now share student attention with other applications. But similarly to what is happening in Internet, a wider variety of possibilities to observe student actions in these experiences are emerging. How feasible is this observation? What can be done with the obtained data? How are privacy and security issues addressed? Data mining techniques such as statistical analysis or machine-learning are already being used in what is known as “Educational Data Mining”.

More recently, the term “learning analytics” appeared to denote also a variety of methods to gain understating on the environment in which students learn. In this talk we will show how analytics can be deployed to almost any learning experience. We will present examples of how to observe events, the kind of observations that are obtained, and how can they be used to improve the overall quality of any experience.

Bio

Abelardo Pardo is an Associate Professor of Telematics Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests are in the area of computer-supported collaborative learning, adaptive hypermedia and multimedia content creation. He is member of the .LRN community where he participated in the implementation of the Learning Design support within the platform. He has also participated in several international research projects and is the principal investigator of the Flexo project on adaptive elearning platforms.