Jekyll2021-02-02T23:28:51+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/feed.xmlA set of pages dealing with learning analytics beyond the LMS...Kirsty KittoBuilding LA ecosystems2019-06-18T00:00:00+00:002019-06-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/LASIworkshop<p>Welcome! This blog post has resources and links for the workshop I am giving for <a href="https://solaresearch.org/events/lasi/lasi19/">LASI19</a> on <em>Building Learning Analytics Ecosystems</em>. Follow the links alongside to find the relevant activity.</p>
<h2 id="my-slides">My Slides</h2>
<p><a href="/assets/slides/BuildingLAEcosystems.pptx">Download them</a> if you want to have a look! (Don’t skip ahead though! Grrrr.)</p>
<h2 id="activity-build-a-lrp">Activity: Build a LRP</h2>
<p>NB: Make sure you ask Kirsty to give you login information for the LRS so that you can go and have a look at the data resulting from this exercise! (She is not sharing it here as we are goign to use one of her private LRSs!)</p>
<p>This exercise is going to give you a taster in what it takes to build a LRP (Learning Record Provider). I also expect that it will introduce you all to the issues associated with achieving data interoperability across multiple LRPs… but more on that later ;) We are building off of the great starter resources provided by <a href="https://learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2322/getting-started-with-xapi-four-lines-of-code">Anthony Altieri</a> and <a href="https://elearningart.com/blog/xapi/">Bryan Jones</a>, but with a slight twist… you should work out your own statements! Feel free to look at those tutorials if you are having troubles, but you should work to define a statement that best describes the specific action being performed by the learner you are tracking.</p>
<p>Basically, here are the four steps you must take to send an xAPI statement to a LRS:</p>
<ol>
<li>Define a variable that holds the URL address of the learning record store (LRS) and the username and password to authenticate</li>
<li>Tell the browser to use that variable for the LRS</li>
<li>Create a variable and define the xAPI statement</li>
<li>Send the statement</li>
</ol>
<p>Below you will see some more detailed instructions about how to do this… pair up with someone you don’t know and work with them through this activity!</p>
<h3 id="follow-these-steps">Follow these steps</h3>
<ol>
<li>Download <a href="/assets/LRPexercise.zip">this file</a> and open up <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">LRP.html</code> in your favourite text editor</li>
<li>You will need to fill in a few fields:
<ul>
<li>LRS endpoint: https://lasi-workshop.lrs.io/xapi/</li>
<li>Username: participant</li>
<li>Password: password</li>
<li>the learner’s unique id (an email will work here, but feel free to add extra information to this field… look up the stuff you can add <a href="https://github.com/adlnet/xAPI-Spec/blob/master/xAPI-Data.md#actor">here</a>)</li>
<li>the verb (and maybe an activity… look at the xAPI specification linked to above for info!)</li>
<li>an object</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>You need to go and get some files from ADL to support sending statements!
<ul>
<li>Go to <a href="https://github.com/adlnet/xAPIWrapper">https://github.com/adlnet/xAPIWrapper</a></li>
<li>Go to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">dist</code> folder, copy the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">xapiwrapper.min.js</code> file and paste it into the folder you have your <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">LRP.html</code> file in</li>
<li>Go to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">lib</code> folder, copy the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cryptojs_v3.1.2.js</code> file and paste it into the same folder</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Open up the edited file in your web browser. Try clicking the button - does it work?</li>
<li>Log into the LRS and explore the data in it… are your statements there? Here are some things that might help you troubleshoot if your statements are not showing up:
<ul>
<li>are your statements legal? Check the spec, or… see the next step</li>
<li>check the log entries… you might find some error messages pertaining to your LRP (where are these in this LRS? Can you find them?)</li>
<li>have you got your <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">xapiwrapper.min.js</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cryptojs_v3.1.2.js</code> files in the right place? NB. you need to have a wrapper file for your <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">LRP.html</code> file to work!</li>
<li>if you are still having troubles then the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">LRP-example.html</code> file should work… (if you have the wrappers etc. in the same folder)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Go and have a look at the other statements in the LRS! What analytics and reporting does it provide? Are they any good?</li>
<li>Can you extend your LRP to provide more information? What about a <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">context</code> element? Maybe you can add a second button or other thing to the page… how would you define a statement for that object?</li>
<li>Try sending your statements to a <em>different</em> LRS! Some of the other free ones are <a href="https://www.yetanalytics.com/free-sandbox-account">Yet</a>, <a href="https://www.watershedlrs.com/product/pricing/essentials-learning-record-store">watershed</a> and <a href="https://rusticisoftware.com/products/scorm-cloud/">SCORMCloud</a>… or you could try creating your own <a href="https://lrs.io/">Veracity</a> one and sending statements there ;)</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="pick-a-challenge">Pick a challenge</h2>
<p>In the afternoon we will focus upon further exploration of key avenues that you find interesting.</p>
<ul>
<li>You need to form into groups of at least 4 who all want to work on one of these challenges (or a combination of them).</li>
<li>You should work together using the resources associated with each challenge to come up with an artefact.</li>
<li>Each group will have to present its findings at the end of the day!</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenge-1-best-practice-xapi-profiles">Challenge 1: best practice xAPI profiles</h3>
<p class="notice--info">Can you build a profile that will provide data the LA community can actually use?</p>
<p><strong>Resources that might help:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.imsglobal.org/sites/default/files/caliper/v1p1/caliper-spec-v1p1/caliper-spec-v1p1.html">xAPI profile starter template</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/adlnet/xapi-profiles">xAPI Profile specification</a></li>
<li><a href="http://xapi.vocab.pub/">all published xAPI profiles</a> (Its not many!)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/caliper">Caliper pages</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.imsglobal.org/sites/default/files/caliper/v1p1/caliper-spec-v1p1/caliper-spec-v1p1.html">Caliper specification</a> and <a href="https://www.imsglobal.org/caliper-11-metric-profiles">Metric profiles</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenge-2-design-an-extension-to-the-la-api-schema">Challenge 2: design an extension to the LA-API schema</h3>
<p class="notice--info">Can you extend the LA-API schema design to facilitate more LA?</p>
<p><strong>Resources that might help:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/tools/LA-API/">LA-API page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://graphql.github.io/graphql-spec/">GraphQL specification</a> and <a href="https://graphql.org/">documentation</a></li>
<li>Ask me to share some example data via our GraphiQL site!</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenge-3-extend-the-la-api">Challenge 3: extend the LA-API</h3>
<p class="notice--info">Can you fork the LA-API/mongo-extract and extend them to add new functionality</p>
<p><strong>Resources that might help:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/tools/LA-API/">LA-API page</a></li>
<li><a href="/tools/CLAtoolkit/">CLA toolkit page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://graphql.github.io/graphql-spec/">GraphQL specification</a> and <a href="https://graphql.org/">documentation</a></li>
<li>Ask me to share some example data via our GraphiQL site!</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenge-4-design-a-dashboard">Challenge 4: design a dashboard</h3>
<p class="notice--info">Can you leverage data interop to build dashboards that self populate using all relevant data?</p>
<p><strong>Resources that might help:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/tools/LA-API/">LA-API page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://graphql.github.io/graphql-spec/">GraphQL specification</a> and <a href="https://graphql.org/">documentation</a></li>
<li>a <a href="http://canvasdashboard.utscic.edu.au/">configurable dashboard prototype</a> we built a couple of years ago, which does not currently link to data (sourcecode <a href="https://github.com/uts-cic/CanvasDashboard">here</a>)</li>
<li>Ask me to share some example data via our GraphiQL site!</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenge-5-explore-the-ethics-of-data-interoperability">Challenge 5: explore the ethics of data interoperability</h3>
<p class="notice--info">What might go wrong if data flows across institutional boundaries?</p>
<ul>
<li>Ask Kirsty to share the paper she just wrote on this issue…</li>
<li>Have a look at this <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Deborah_West7/publication/332263485_The_Ethics_of_Learning_Analytics_in_Australian_Higher_Education_DISCUSSION_PAPER_PREPARED_BY/links/5caab27e92851c64bd57b3f1/The-Ethics-of-Learning-Analytics-in-Australian-Higher-Education-DISCUSSION-PAPER-PREPARED-BY.pdf">white paper</a> on the topic (published in 2019)</li>
<li>Look up anything by Prinsloo and Slade</li>
</ul>Kirsty KittoWelcome! This blog post has resources and links for the workshop I am giving for LASI19 on Building Learning Analytics Ecosystems. Follow the links alongside to find the relevant activity.What does data portability actually entail?2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:002019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/DataPortGDPR<p>Today I read a pretty interesting paper on GDPRs right to <a href="/dataPortability/">data portability</a>, or <a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/">Article 20</a>, which states that:</p>
<div class="notice--primary">
"The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided, where:
<ol type="a">
<li>the processing is based on consent pursuant to point (a) of Article 6(1) or point (a) of Article 9(2) or on a contract pursuant to point (b) of Article 6(1); and</li>
<li>the processing is carried out by automated means."</li>
</ol>
</div>
<p>Go have a look at this paper - its an interesting read!</p>
<p class="notice--info">De Hert, P., Papakonstantinou, V., Malgieri, G., Beslay, L., & Sanchez, I. (2018). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364917303333">The right to data portability in the GDPR: Towards user-centric interoperability of digital services</a>. Computer Law & Security Review, 34(2), 193-203.</p>
<p>It does a great job looking at the historical evolution of this right in drafts of the GDPR, how they were changed in the final legislation (and what that means), and how the rights to access and erasure interact with the right to data portability. Interestingly, this paper made me aware of a concession in paragraph 4 of <a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/">Article 20</a> which states that</p>
<p class="notice--primary">“The right referred to in paragraph 1 shall not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others.”</p>
<p>That is, if one person demanding data portability <em>harms</em> another person then the right of that second person to e.g. erasure appears to trump the right of the first person to portability. This means that if a specific student could demonstrate <em>harm</em> resulting from us making groupwork data available to other students in a group (perhaps in a personal data store) then they could demand that it be deleted.</p>
<p>However, as the paper points out:</p>
<p class="notice--primary">“In practice this means that judges will need to determine – on a case-by-case approach – when the right to data portability will adversely affect rights and freedom of others in a specific circumstance.”</p>
<p>Interesting indeed. I am very curious to see what happens when a claim like this does eventually end up in a court! Something for the learning analytics community to mull over though… how are we going to navigate this very tricky boundary?</p>Kirsty KittoToday I read a pretty interesting paper on GDPRs right to data portability, or Article 20, which states that:Reboot2019-05-01T00:00:00+00:002019-05-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/Reboot<p>Right - I have finally found some time to breathe, which means I have managed to update the beyondLMS website! This is good, as you might have noticed that the old one broke at some point, and was getting a bit old anyway.</p>
<p>In the next period I am going to be working quite a bit more on <a href="/dataPortability/">data portability</a> and the <a href="/tools/LA-API/">LA-API</a>. Things are really starting to ramp up here. Stay tuned!</p>
<p>Let’s see if I can get this blog up and running again…</p>Kirsty KittoRight - I have finally found some time to breathe, which means I have managed to update the beyondLMS website! This is good, as you might have noticed that the old one broke at some point, and was getting a bit old anyway.Excited about Data Interoperability2016-02-17T00:00:00+00:002016-02-17T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/excited<p>Ok, I will admit it. I am a bit excited. I think that the next few months could prove to be a bit of a turning point, in a number of different ways. Lots of stuff is happening, and a lot of it could prove to be very important when we look back…</p>
<p>I am writing this post while sitting on a plane that is heading back from the US. I had a busy couple of days there, an <a href="http://connectionsforum.com/get-involved/">xAPI Camp</a> at Autodesk in San Franscisco, followed by our first DISC meeting, held at UpToAllofUs, an event organised by Aaron and Megan of <a href="http://makingbetter.us/">MakingBetter</a>.</p>
<h3 id="xapi-camp---autodesk">xAPI Camp - Autodesk</h3>
<p>Check out the information about the event <a href="http://connectionsforum.com/autodesk-san-francisco-february-2016/">here</a>. Slides are available now, but they filmed it, so all the talks should go up at some point. This was my first xAPI Camp in the flesh, and it was great to put faces to the names of some of the xAPI community. Australia can be a long way from everywhere, and it is pretty easy for us to miss out on what is going on, although sometimes this can be an opportunity, as it can stop us from getting stuck in the same rut as everyone else. (I remember reading a spiel by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Bak">Per Bak</a> in <i>How Nature Works</i> about how being isolated in Denmark gave him the room to develop Self-Organised Criticality - I guess being a long way away is both a blessing and a curse). So, what kinds of things were on the agenda? Learning. This event had a really nice shift in emphasis towards how we might use xAPI to help people to become better people, to learn better, to use their own data to enable life-long learning.. and so to Learning Analytics. Looks like there is a lot of good technical work in the pipeline too - Security, Linked Data, Profiles.. the spec is really moving forwards.</p>
<p>One thing that I was particularly taken by was a short presentation by Russell Duhon about the xAPI Vocabulary Specification that is under development. This is a really important step forward for xAPI - we really need to start thinking more about data interoperatiblity, as it will not help having LRSs that can talk to each other if the data they are sharing uses different vocabularies and data structures. In fact this was the subject of my presentation too :) What really caught my eye is that the spec is using Linked Data, which is something we actually suggested xAPI needs in <a href="/assets/papers/xapiAnalytics.pdf">a new paper</a> that will come out for <a href="http://lak16.solaresearch.org/">LAK’16</a>. We were writing that paper about the time that the first draft of the <a href="https://adl.gitbooks.io/companion-specification-for-xapi-vocabularies/content/">specification</a> got released! (Remember what I said about isolation? Sometimes it pays to show up to the party in the flesh :) So, this is something that I am going to be trying to find out a lot more about over the next few months as it is definitely going to help me with some plans I have forming… If you want to find out more about this very important work then my advice is for you to start with the <a href="https://adl.gitbooks.io/experience-xapi-vocabulary-primer/content/">primer</a> as it has a lot more details about why the idea is important and how it might be used.</p>
<h3 id="disc---the-way-forward-for-xapi">DISC - the way forward for xAPI</h3>
<p>After way too many drinks, and a mammoth karaoke session (not something I ever thought I would have to own up to) we headed to Sonoma county for <a href="http://uptoallof.us/">UpToAllofUs</a>, an event which included the inagural DISC board of directors meeting among a whole heap of other interesting discussions and shennanigans. As discussed by Aaron Silvers in <a href="http://xapiquarterly.com/2015/09/the-way-of-xapis-consortium/">this article</a> DISC (The Data Interoperability Sandards Consortium) will take key responsibility for xAPI as ADL releases it to the EdTech space under an Apache license. DISC will be what we as a community make it, and consequently, so will xAPI - it will be essential that we all get involved in driving forwards with what we want xAPI to be and where we want it to go. The goal of DISC will be to facilitate those efforts, and to ensure that we do indeed finally end up with an educational data standard that enables things like <a href="http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2016/02/23/open-learning-analytics-again/">open learning analytics</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPortability">data portability</a>, and in my ideal world <a href="http://www.laceproject.eu/blog/towards-a-manifesto-for-data-ownership/">lifelong data ownership</a>. I got to sit in on that inaugural meeting, because I somehow ended up on the board! Gosh - it is a pretty amazing crew (Aaron Silvers, Megan Bowe, Brenda Sanderson, Eric Nerlich, Robert Todd, and me), and I am still finding it hard to believe that I am a part of it. An interesting aside: did you notice that DISC has equal male/female representation? For a board, (let alone a board that is concerned with tech) I consider that an amazing achievement.. what a spec to be involved with :) Watch this space, and if you want to keep in touch then you could start by following the <a href="https://twitter.com/datainterop">DISC twitter account</a>. More details will emerge as we go.</p>
<h3 id="and-theres-more-to-come">And there’s more to come!</h3>
<p>Finally, I just got a whole heap of travel approved. In a week I will be heading down to Adelaide for a Learning Analytics meetup. Going to be drinking lots of coffee (and hopefully beer, wine, etc.) while plotting the next steps for a whole heap of projects with a bunch of excellent people, many of whom are working on the CLA toolkit with me. Then, after I get back to Brisbane it is off to the UK, for <a href="http://oer16.oerconf.org/">OER’16</a>, <a href="http://connectionsforum.com/jisc-london-422/">xAPI Camp Jisc</a>, the <a href="http://lak16.solaresearch.org/?page_id=204">LAK’16 hackathon</a> and finally <a href="http://lak16.solaresearch.org/">LAK’16</a> itself. I reckon that lots of important things are going to start moving there… I will keep you in the loop if I find some time to write it all down - or you could just show up and join in :)</p>Kirsty KittoOk, I will admit it. I am a bit excited. I think that the next few months could prove to be a bit of a turning point, in a number of different ways. Lots of stuff is happening, and a lot of it could prove to be very important when we look back…Down and Dirty with Data for SLA - Part 22015-11-26T00:00:00+00:002015-11-26T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/ALASI15Part2<p>This blog post is the second of two aimed at people attending <a href="https://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/analytics/alasi.htm">ALASI 2015</a>. Check out the <a href="/blog/ALASI15Part1/">first post</a>, which has some pre-workshop preparation, and most importantly <b>gives you some instructions about how to create an account in the CLA toolkit.</b></p>
<p>If you are interested in participating in the workshop from beyond ALASI’15 then you are welcome, follow the specific instructions below.</p>
<h3 id="alasi-workshop---stages-and-basic-lesson-plan">ALASI workshop - Stages and basic lesson plan</h3>
<p>The workshop will cover the following topics in a series of mini-workshops. Each subsection will build upon what has gone before, but if you miss the first session, you should still be able to walk in to the second one (it will be easier to do this if you complete the preparation phase in <a href="/blog/ALASI15Part1/">stage one</a> first. Topics will be discussed in the following loose order:</p>
<ol>
<li>Introduction to project, data generation and sign up to CLA toolkit (Kirsty Kitto)</li>
<li>Social Network and Content Analysis (Aneesha Bakharia & Shane Dawson)</li>
<li>Feedback Loops (Abelardo Pardo)</li>
<li><strong>Break</strong></li>
<li>Discourse Analytics (Andrew Gibson & Simon Buckingham Shum)</li>
<li>Nature of Interaction (Community of Inquiry and Cognitive Presence) (Dragan Gasevic & Kirsty Kitto)</li>
<li>What should you measure? (Grace Lynch)</li>
<li>Future developments and how to get involved (Kirsty Kitto)</li>
</ol>
<p>If you are would like to join in from elsewhere in the world (or even just another room at ALASI) then you should:</p>
<ol>
<li>Follow these hashtags: #clatoolkit, #LAbarriers, #LAfixes, #alasi15-dad</li>
<li>Check out our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ZF2gBUnvx5YQcHlRrodMxYFKAgVsPOC ">Youtube channel</a> and enter some responses in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgWmpb4qnKicxbFqaMoAhnA/discussion">discussion thread</a></li>
<li>Follow the instructions that get posted to the #alasi15-dad hashtag on Twitter</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="instructor-facing-dashboard">Instructor Facing Dashboard</h3>
<p>You can go to <a href="http://clatoolkit.beyondlms.org/">this link</a> to check out the instructor facing dashboard for the ALASI’15 data set.<br />
<b>login:</b> staff-dashboard<br />
<b>password:</b> alasi15<br /></p>Kirsty KittoThis blog post is the second of two aimed at people attending ALASI 2015. Check out the first post, which has some pre-workshop preparation, and most importantly gives you some instructions about how to create an account in the CLA toolkit.Down and Dirty with Data for SLA - Part 12015-11-18T00:00:00+00:002015-11-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/ALASI15Part1<p>This blog post is really aimed at people attending <a href="https://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/analytics/alasi.htm">ALASI 2015</a> where we will be running a workshop. However, the workshop itself will be blended.. you can participate from anywhere if you like. In particular, you are very welcome to help us generate the dataset that everyone will be analysing in the workshop by following the steps below. This will give you a chance to try out the CLA toolkit if you are interested. Make sure you come back for Part 2 next week, when we will give you some guidance for exploring your dashboard! So let’s get started.</p>
<h2 id="alasi-workshop---preparation-phase">ALASI workshop - preparation phase</h2>
<p>This workshop will give you a chance to explore and analyse a real life data set that is generated by people participating in a social learning activity. The learning activity will be undertaken by you! We are going to ask you to think about the issues that surround the institutional adoption of learning analytics, and discuss these with one another using two standard social media channels. That means that the more you participate in the learning activity, the more interesting your data set will be!</p>
<p>NB: Even if you are not attending ALASI’15, or not planning on attending the workshop, then the distributed nature of this workshop means that you will be able to participate in it anyway. You may miss out on some of the in-class activities, but you are welcome to join in as much as you like!</p>
<h3 id="objectives">Objectives</h3>
<p>This workshop has two objectives.
<ol type="A">
<li>To discuss the issues that surround the institutional adoption of learning analytics.</li>
<li>To learn how to analyse data generated by a social learning activity. </li>
</ol></p>
<h3 id="outcomes">Outcomes</h3>
<p>You will have the chance to explore the different Learning Analytics techniques that can be used to understand the nature and quality of online interactions between the members of a class. You will also have a chance to think about the issues associated with collecting poor data, or applying inappropriate metrics to a data set. This will help you to approach LA from a more sophisticated perspective.</p>
<h3 id="resources">Resources</h3>
<p>Your participation in this workshop will be helped by having the following set up already:
<ol>
<li>A Twitter account. If you do not have one, go and create something temporary. We will use twitter to post comments with specific hashtags that are then collected and incorporated in the data set.</li>
<li>A Youtube account so that you can post comments on the YouTube channel that we have set up (from which we will also collect data).</li>
<li>You will also learn a lot more during this workshop if you bring a laptop computer along, or make friends with someone who appears to have one when you walk in… go make a friend! </li>
</ol></p>
<h3 id="workplan">Workplan</h3>
<p>The workshop will work best if you do some preparation before coming (yes - we are flipping the workshop on you ;) We also think that you will find the workshop more interesting if you have some “skin in the game” and so have generated some of the data that you will be analysing. To this end, we have created a basic learning activity that we would like you to participate in… before ALASI’15.</p>
<h3 id="pre-workshop-tasks">Pre-workshop Tasks</h3>
<p>Before coming to the workshop you should have a go at the following set of tasks.</p>
<h4 id="step-1-sign-up-for-the-cla-toolkit">Step 1: Sign up for the CLA Toolkit!</h4>
<p>Go and enter the necessary details at <a href="http://clatoolkit.beyondlms.org/clatoolkit/register/?course_code=ALASI2015">our ALASI sign-up page</a></p>
<p>The whole exercise will work best if you enter your Twitter account and Youtube information :)</p>
<p>NB1: If you skip this step then you will not be able to look at your own data in the workshop!<br />
NB2: Signing up means that any tweets you make to the hashtags below will be collected by the CLA Toolkit!</p>
<h4 id="step-2-explore-our-youtube-channel">Step 2: Explore our YouTube Channel</h4>
<p>We have set up a channel for the workshop here on our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ZF2gBUnvx5YQcHlRrodMxYFKAgVsPOC ">CLA toolkit ALASI 2015 Youtube channel</a></p>
<ol>
<li>Go and watch some of the videos in the channel. The videos are in a playlist.</li>
<li>Think about the following questions:
<ul>
<li>What are the main barriers preventing the use of learning analytics at scale?</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>(Tweet ideas to #LAbarriers)</li>
<li>What ideas do you have that might help to resolve these barriers?</li>
<li>(Tweet ideas to #LAfixes)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Go to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgWmpb4qnKicxbFqaMoAhnA/discussion">discussion thread</a> for the channel (under Discussion tab) and leave a post that discusses any ideas that you have about how it might be possible to help in the facilitation of LA at your institution.
<h5 id="extras">Extras:</h5>
</li>
<li>If you see any comments there that you would like to respond to, vote up, vote down etc. then feel free to do this.</li>
<li>If you would like to add a link to a video that you think might be of interest then feel free to do this.</li>
<li>If you would like to create a video discussing relevant issues and upload it to the channel then you are also welcome to do this!</li>
</ol>
<h4 id="step-3-optional-extra---explore-your-current-student-facing-cla-toolkit-dashboard">Step 3: Optional Extra - Explore your current (student facing) CLA toolkit dashboard</h4>
<ul>
<li>Log onto <a href="http://clatoolkit.beyondlms.org/">http://clatoolkit.beyondlms.org/</a> using the login information you entered above.</li>
<li>Play around as much or as little as you like.</li>
<li>Explore our thoughts about the current state of the dashboards at the <a href="/blog/TrialsUI/">project blog</a>.</li>
<li>Tweet any ideas about how the dashboards might be improved to #clatoolkit</li>
<li>If you get any new ideas about institutional adoption etc. then feel free to share them using whatever channel you consider most appropriate.</li>
</ul>Kirsty KittoThis blog post is really aimed at people attending ALASI 2015 where we will be running a workshop. However, the workshop itself will be blended.. you can participate from anywhere if you like. In particular, you are very welcome to help us generate the dataset that everyone will be analysing in the workshop by following the steps below. This will give you a chance to try out the CLA toolkit if you are interested. Make sure you come back for Part 2 next week, when we will give you some guidance for exploring your dashboard! So let’s get started.Trialling the CLAToolkit - Dashboards and Adventures with IFN6142015-11-09T00:00:00+00:002015-11-09T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/TrialsUI<p>So… its been a while. Sorry, but these last few months have been pretty busy. We have been madly rolling out functionality, finding out what people think about it, and then trying new things and upgrades. We have also been running a first trial with a real actual unit run at QUT
<a href="http://2015.informationprograms.info/">IFN614: Information Programs</a> which is run by an academic in my School <a href="http://higheredukate.com/who-is-kate/">Kate Davis</a>. Kate is one of your classic Teach in the Wild types. She has a long history of using innovative Wordpress set-ups for her classes that blow your standard LMS out of the water. Normally Kate spends a couple of weeks at the beginning of semester posting announcements in Blackboard (QUT’s standard LMS) saying that the class is not there, and that they should follow a link to her actual teaching site. Check out the difference in the two setups when it comes to IFN614:</p>
<h4 id="blackboard">Blackboard:</h4>
<p><img src="/assets/images/IFN614-blackboard.jpg" alt="IFN614, Blackboard Site" class="align-center" /></p>
<h4 id="versus-wordpress">Versus WordPress:</h4>
<p><img src="/assets/images/IFN614-wordpress.jpg" alt="IFN614, Wordpress Site" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Of particular interest to us, Kate has strong participation requirements for this unit, students need to post on blogs in the wordpress site, and participate in regular Twitter chats using hashtags specified at the beginning of semester. These chats go nuts. I have watched a couple and they get an insane amount of action. A couple of weeks ago Kate was telling me that she normally has three different screens focussed on different parts of the chat, and she still misses most of what is going on. Historically, Kate has had to manually trawl through twitter to work out how well her students participated in the unit… you can imagine how easy that is. This makes her a fantastic candidate for our project.. hopefully it is really going to help her out down the track.</p>
<p>So. We gave Kate’s students the option to sign up for a trial of the CLA toolkit. Data was collected from the designated hashtags used in the class as well as from the Wordpress forums. The class has 34 students, and about a third signed up (twelve students were in the system the last time I checked). The class has pretty much finished now (they are all madly finishing off assignments etc.) so we pretty much have our full data set now. Lets use it go explore some of the reports that are available in the CLA toolkit.</p>
<p>First, lets check out the Activity Dashboard for the unit.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/IFN614-Activity.jpg" alt="IFN614, Activity" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>When do you think the twitter chats were? ;) Note that by the end of the semester these things were getting about 300 tweets just from the signed up cohort! (Although Kate herself was normally responsible for around 80 of them.. talk about <a href="https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/description-teaching-presence/">teacher presence</a>!) Note also that the chats got more active as the class progressed and the class started finding their feet. See down the bottom there is a little slider? That lets people zoom down into more specific points in time. They can then filter some of the other reports off of this restricted period (at the moment this works with SNA and a wordcloud but this functionality should roll out to all the widgets over summer). The Activity report also lets the instructor drop down into the student dashboard, which I am a bit worried is too boring at the moment… In our ethics application we said that we would only show students data about their own behaviour in the system. This means that, for example, the SNA shown to the students is only about <i>their</i> tweets to someone else. Check out my student dashboard SNA for our PROJ-TEAM unit (which is collecting data from the #clatoolkit, #xAPI and #learninganalytics hashtags).</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/PROJ-TEAM-Student.jpg" alt="Student dashboard for project team" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>That shot also shows you another feature - students can select specific links and then see what interactions led to those links in another report below… here we see some of the places where I have mentioned @aneesha in a tweet. But back to the point… Here is the equivalent instructor facing report for PROJ-TEAM</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/PROJ-TEAM-SNA.jpg" alt="SNA for the project team" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Its a lot more interesting hey? We are currently trying to work out what a nice balance is between privacy and information.. I think at the moment we might be leaning a bit too much towards privacy. Might have to go back and get a variation to the ethics application once we work out a good balance. Now, just as an aside.. If you explore that shot you can also see that a couple of the project team have not signed up yet.. You should totally pay them out if you work out who they are ;) So.. anyway this instructor facing SNA report also lets you do the click on a link and explore specific interactions, which is really useful for working out how different members of a cohort are interacting with one another. And if we think back to the Activity report then we should recall that we can look at the interactions that occurred over a specific more limited period of time - another feature that I have been using quite a bit.</p>
<p>One more set of reports are currently available, geared towards Content Analysis. These give sentiment analysis, a word cloud and a Topic Model based on <a href="http://nlp.stanford.edu/events/illvi2014/papers/sievert-illvi2014.pdf">LDAvis</a></p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/PROJ-TEAM-Content.jpg" alt="Project team content dashboard" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>This report is going to see a lot of development over the next few months - fun times ahead! :)</p>
<p>Anywho.. back to IFN614..
Here is a zoomed out representation of the Social Network Analysis of the class that Kate can see at the moment.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/IFN614-SNA.jpg" alt="IFN614, SNA" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Cool huh? Its a pretty connected class.</p>Kirsty KittoSo… its been a while. Sorry, but these last few months have been pretty busy. We have been madly rolling out functionality, finding out what people think about it, and then trying new things and upgrades. We have also been running a first trial with a real actual unit run at QUT IFN614: Information Programs which is run by an academic in my School Kate Davis. Kate is one of your classic Teach in the Wild types. She has a long history of using innovative Wordpress set-ups for her classes that blow your standard LMS out of the water. Normally Kate spends a couple of weeks at the beginning of semester posting announcements in Blackboard (QUT’s standard LMS) saying that the class is not there, and that they should follow a link to her actual teaching site. Check out the difference in the two setups when it comes to IFN614:xAPI Analytics - Stepping out of the LRS (Part 1)2015-07-27T00:00:00+00:002015-07-27T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/xAPISteppingOutoftheLRS<p>xAPI statements are stored in a Learning Record Store (LRS). The API specification defines how statements are inserted and provides a very basic way to retrieve statements. The specification does not define anyway to query the LRS across all stored fields or return aggregate counts. Various LRS implementations exist and most use a database as a backend, Learning Locker for example uses MongoDB. The underlying database technology used in most LRS implementations supports ad-hoc querying and this allows LRS vendors to build reporting and data warehousing capabilities. The xAPI specification however only requires that full statements are returned and that a link, available for 24 hours remains for access to the queried data which can then be traversed over (if multiple pages) to obtain the statements for further processing and analysis. This is understandable as the LRS is middleware and contains an enormous amount of data making ad-hoc querying inefficient. Data needs to be extracted and transformed into a data warehouse for advanced analytics. LRS vendors such as WaxLRS and YetAnalytics are already providing analytics in their products. The xAPI community however needs to share ideas on creating custom dashboards, reports and advanced analytics. This has been the main driver behind writing a series of blog posts on “Stepping out of the LRS”.</p>
<p>In the “Stepping out of the LRS” series of blog posts, open source tools will be used to build analytics for xAPI statements extracted from an LRS. The focus will be on using open source tools to:</p>
<ul>
<li>ingest and expose the xAPI statements for aggregate queries</li>
<li>build a configurable dashboard</li>
<li>encourage experimentation with open source log processing and dashboard visualisation tools</li>
</ul>
<p>In Part 2, xAPI statements will be stored in Postgres with a dashboard built in <a href="http://redash.io/">Re:Dash</a>. Postgres is a relational database with excellent support for storing and querying json documents. ReDash is a unique dashboard application build in Python and Django. Re:Dash is able to store queries and then display the results in a variety of widgets.</p>
<p>In Part 3, xAPI statements will be stored in <a href="https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch">ElasticSearch</a> with a dashboard provided by <a href="https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana">Kibana</a>. ElasticSearch and Kibana are used extensively for log file processing.</p>aneeshaxAPI statements are stored in a Learning Record Store (LRS). The API specification defines how statements are inserted and provides a very basic way to retrieve statements. The specification does not define anyway to query the LRS across all stored fields or return aggregate counts. Various LRS implementations exist and most use a database as a backend, Learning Locker for example uses MongoDB. The underlying database technology used in most LRS implementations supports ad-hoc querying and this allows LRS vendors to build reporting and data warehousing capabilities. The xAPI specification however only requires that full statements are returned and that a link, available for 24 hours remains for access to the queried data which can then be traversed over (if multiple pages) to obtain the statements for further processing and analysis. This is understandable as the LRS is middleware and contains an enormous amount of data making ad-hoc querying inefficient. Data needs to be extracted and transformed into a data warehouse for advanced analytics. LRS vendors such as WaxLRS and YetAnalytics are already providing analytics in their products. The xAPI community however needs to share ideas on creating custom dashboards, reports and advanced analytics. This has been the main driver behind writing a series of blog posts on “Stepping out of the LRS”.xAPI Camp2015-07-21T00:00:00+00:002015-07-21T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/xAPICamp<p>So today we are “speaking” at <a href="http://connectionsforum.com/xapi-camp-seattle/">xAPI Camp</a>! Not really, I am in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburg_im_Breisgau">Freiburg</a> visiting some collaborators for another project, and Aneesha is still in Brisbane, but together with the help of <a href="http://andrewresearch.net/">Andrew Gibson</a> (one of my PhD students, who seems to actually know what he is doing when it comes to making videos… unlike me) we have created a video that will be screened, and will then join in on a twitter discussion (assuming people actually want to tweet to us :)</p>
<p>I am hoping this will be interesting. The motivation underlying the video is to try and get the xAPI community moving forwards on a few key initiatives to do with data sharing and portabiity. When asked to write a short paragraph about why I was “attending” xAPI Camp I said that: “<i>I think that xAPI is at a critical juncture, and it is important for the community to reflect upon its purpose at this point. What are we going to do with our xAPI data? Is it just for the managers and HR departments, or are we going to give it to the learner? What kinds of things do we want to report on? I would like to see xAPI data used to enable things like discourse analytics, creativity, metacognition, and life long personalised learning, but in order to do this we need to consider analytics and controlled vocabularies. I am looking forwards to a conversation about data extraction, complex analytics, and learner focused reporting…how can we use the standard to encourage higher order thinking in our learners?</i>” (see the other presenter paragraphs <a href="http://risc-inc.com/blog/why-attend-xapi-camp-amazon-part-2/">here</a>).</p>
<p>I really mean this. Are we playing the same old games here? Or are we going to try and create a new and better data standard? One with the learner at its heart. Wouldn’t it be great if our learners could own their data, and take it with them from School to University to Work? What if they could use it to create their own portfolios of skills and capabilities… and use this to tell a story about their mastery of key knowledge as they mature. There are many ethical and technical issues involved in this kind of vision.</p>
<p>To me, the biggest ethical ones are all to do with data ownership and the right to be forgotten… should the enormous fight (about his pedagogy of all things!) that I had with my Electromagnetism and Relativity lecturer at age 20 show up as an indicator for “aggression” when I am 40? This fight resulted in my later failure of the course (not directly because of him… I just stopped participating), but then there is the HD I got the next year. I think it would be a terrible thing if these kinds of records became even more widely available then they currently are, but the age of data collection is upon us, and I think we owe it to ourselves and each other to behave very responsibly here. (Far more than we have so far.) I am tired of listening to that certain subset of “baby boomers” who never really understood data talking about how “<a href="http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf">digital natives</a>” don’t care if we collect data about them. If you ask them the right way they patently do… in fact some of them have a very sophisticated notion of data ownership. So that is one set of issues… hard ones, but I do think that a data ownership model goes some way towards alleviating them… although this opens up its own technical issues as <a href="http://connectionsforum.com/vimeo-video/ben-betts-on-personal-data/">Ben Betts talks about at another xAPI Camp</a>. I have been asked to write a blog for the <a href="http://www.laceproject.eu/">LACE project</a> about this, so will most definitely put my musings about it down here at some point when things calm down.</p>
<p>In my view, the biggest technical issues stem from data portability, and this is the key focus of the video. We are introducing the CLA toolkit, which means that we get to talk about xAPI, recipes, data extraction, and finally analytics… and paint a picture about how these all fit together in the more complex use cases that this kind of lifelong data ownership model would require. Have a watch of the video and see what you think. I might try to generate a summary of the Twitter conversation (if anything emerges) in a couple of days in a follow up blog.</p>
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<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/MOqEkf9lv0c" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>Kirsty KittoSo today we are “speaking” at xAPI Camp! Not really, I am in Freiburg visiting some collaborators for another project, and Aneesha is still in Brisbane, but together with the help of Andrew Gibson (one of my PhD students, who seems to actually know what he is doing when it comes to making videos… unlike me) we have created a video that will be screened, and will then join in on a twitter discussion (assuming people actually want to tweet to us :)How should we teach in the wild? (Infrastructure and Swiss Wanderwegs)2015-07-18T00:00:00+00:002015-07-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.beyondlms.org/blog/wanderweg<p>So, for the last week or so I was in Switzerland. I had a conference to attend in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filzbach">Filzbach</a>, but coming from Australia, you are braver than me if you don’t try to arrive at least a couple of days before you have to deal with sitting in a room all day.. jetlag means that I almost inevitably end up falling asleep after lunch if I don’t arrive a bit earlier. What does one do? Well, there is a lot of climbing in Switzerland.. but I only had a few days free before the conference, so instead of trying to meet up with friends, I just headed down to the alps to go walking in the mountains by myself for a couple of days. As a climber, the Eiger has a certain facination for me, so I went to <a href="http://grindelwald.ch/">Grindelwald</a> and then wandered up into the mountains (on a Wanderweg - surprise, surprise ;) Now, what is awesome about the Wanderwegs of Switzerland? Infrastructure. But it is not an infrastructure that is just devoted to trying to keep you safe, not too many rails and boardwalked tracks there… and you can still get into an enourmous amount of trouble if you don’t prepare well… but you are scaffolded in your wandering (more or less as you choose). You can judge your ability and choose your route accordingly, which means that you can also have an amazing time. A choose your own type of <i>personalised</i> amazing time. I started musing about the wanderwegs as a metaphor for education while I was wandering around from hut to hut…</p>
<p>How should we structure our educational system? Should it be safe and well curated?</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/safe.jpg" alt="Safe walking" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Or should it be wild and a little bit scary?</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/wildScary.jpg" alt="Wild and scary" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>I think that it probably needs to be a little bit of both.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/safeScary.jpg" alt="Safe and scary" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Perhaps we should stop “looking after” our learners at all… we could just point them in the direction that they need to go and let them wander off to succeed or fail…</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/wanderwegSign.jpg" alt="Wanderweg sign" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>I think that it might be more effective if we lightly show them the way every now and again, when they need it.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/showWay.jpg" alt="Lighter approach to showing the way" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>The awesome thing about the Swiss mountains is that the infrastructure lets you do things that would normally be considered very wild in an incredibly safe manner… Thus you can catch a train up to <a href="http://www.jungfrau.ch/en/quick-navigation/top-of-europe/all-information/">Jungfraujoch</a> and then walk across a glacier! This is not a normal “safe” experience. You are “in the wild” but you are there in a very safe way.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/safeGlacier.jpg" alt="A safe glacier" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>They also do an impressive job of making the “boring bits” (i.e. the ones that are not essential to the journey) easy… you can persevere if you want, but it is not all that necessary.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/boringBitsEasy.jpg" alt="You can make the boring bits easy" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>And you pretty much always get to celebrate your accomplishments at the end of your journey.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/celebrateAccomplishment1.jpg" alt="Celebrate 1" class="align-center" /></p>
<p><img src="/assets/images/celebrateAccomplishment2.jpg" alt="Celebrate 2" class="align-center" /></p>
<p>Now why can’t our learning systems be set up more like that?</p>Kirsty KittoSo, for the last week or so I was in Switzerland. I had a conference to attend in Filzbach, but coming from Australia, you are braver than me if you don’t try to arrive at least a couple of days before you have to deal with sitting in a room all day.. jetlag means that I almost inevitably end up falling asleep after lunch if I don’t arrive a bit earlier. What does one do? Well, there is a lot of climbing in Switzerland.. but I only had a few days free before the conference, so instead of trying to meet up with friends, I just headed down to the alps to go walking in the mountains by myself for a couple of days. As a climber, the Eiger has a certain facination for me, so I went to Grindelwald and then wandered up into the mountains (on a Wanderweg - surprise, surprise ;) Now, what is awesome about the Wanderwegs of Switzerland? Infrastructure. But it is not an infrastructure that is just devoted to trying to keep you safe, not too many rails and boardwalked tracks there… and you can still get into an enourmous amount of trouble if you don’t prepare well… but you are scaffolded in your wandering (more or less as you choose). You can judge your ability and choose your route accordingly, which means that you can also have an amazing time. A choose your own type of personalised amazing time. I started musing about the wanderwegs as a metaphor for education while I was wandering around from hut to hut…