Day one of the Moodle Moot conference in Perth, Western Australia and I’m sitting in a workshop on Learning Analytics for the day.
I’m a strong advocate for learning analytics and how you can read and understand how the analytics can greatly benefit students and tutors.
There are a number of core plugins in Moodle that you can use to manage some learning analytics including the Activity Completion and Restrict Access. I’d never thought of using these as measurable learning objects, but when you think about it they are.
The presenter, Elizabeth Dalton (@e_m_dalton) is well versed on learning analytics. She indicated that for learning analytics we can measure:
- Engagement
- Interaction
- Performance
- Progress
- Course quality
- Teacher involvement
There are two types of learning:
- Facts in my head
- Things I can do
But how to you measure this?
Elizabeth indicated that there are 2 things that people want based on their positions. The Academic Scholar and the Social Efficiency. Did the student spend enough time on a task to learn as opposed to did they complete the assessment. This will always be a struggle and the definition needs to be defined based on your college’s requirements. For me and my college, I would want to know that the student spent enough time on the formative assessments to gain a better understanding of the subject and improve the retention, although the retention is not measurable at this point.
It’s easy to measure ‘the facts in my head’ by theory based assessments, but what about ‘Things I can do’ in an online enviroment?
If you look at VR, this is measurable and can be ca-turned. If a VR was developed for a kitchen environment for example, the VR can check that processes are done e.g. Sterilization occurred or didn’t. This is one way of measuring outcomes.
Great first day and looking forward to tomorrow – when I present! Ekkkk!!! 🙂
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