Moodle Pty—more widely known within the Moodle community as Moodle HQ—does most of the development of the core Moodle code and maintains tight control over which code submitted by third parties gets accepted into the code base

Information from this will be used to develop learning analytics software features, which will have these functions: Description of learning engagement and progress, Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress, Prediction of learning progress, and Prescription (recommendations) for improvement of learning progress.

Obviously, securing student data is critical. There are a lot of data sharing services that shouldn’t be offered until that security can be guaranteed.

Better yet, tangerines and oranges.

What should Moodle’s course of action be?

Technology is about trade-offs; understanding those tradeoffs is essential to making informed decisions. There’s never a “right” choice; only a right choice for you.

full Caliper Analytics compliance

At the very least, the tool should allow for robust formative assessment, and should be capable of giving timely, helpful feedback to learners.

Capable of including multimedia, annotation, and interaction

publish works containing parts covered by different licenses

a Brazilian Portuguese language textbook they’ve written and maintained for more than 50 years

Remarque Université d'été Sous les Baobabs, Burkina Faso

if cross-format identifiers like DOIs are used, annotations made in one format (eg, EPUB) can be seen in the same document published in other formats (eg, HTML, PDF) and in other locations.

We know that there are few sticky security and implementation issues

Steamrolling public opposition will just not do.

creating the fake appearance of consultation.

corperations

poetry

created by people working together on their own.

I see somebody who is not only not talking about pedagogy, I see someone who is trying to destroy open pedagogy, by destroying communities and replacing them with companies

And I see no good reason why we should require the production of educators and students to be fair game for resellers who want to pluck it for free out of the commons and charge money for it to those not lucky enough to be a part of our community.

This is certainly how the debate about licensing has played out.

Wiley (and a cluster of other OER advocates) insist that creators must use a CC-by license, allowing commercial use, if they want their work to be considered open.

Lumen Learning is in the same business as  Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education: selling textbooks (directly or indirectly) to students.

Publishers previously lost a lot of revenue from textbooks because many students bought secondhand, rented, pirated or just skipped buying textbooks altogether. Inclusive-access programs have changed that.

professors

Docker eventually sold out to (I believe) Bell and the professors did just fine.

A suite of complex online tools was designed to assist with analyzing student behavior in the LMS and with the development of interactive learning objects at the activity level.

When you think the problem to be solved is the high cost of textbooks, inclusive access programs and OER adoption are just two competing approaches to solving the problem.

Students often lose access to their materials at the end of the semester Students also often lose access to their own work as well, in the form of highlights, notes, and other annotations

Publishers can compete with free textbooks by making their more-restrictive-than-all-right-reserved offerings 70% more affordable.

the way of MOOCs – a few years of wild hype about revolutionary potential followed by inevitable domestication by the academy.

By focusing on cost, the article takes a page directly from the publishers’ playbook.

it's community contributions

ethics of video games in archaeology

LRSs will typically only have minor data analysis built in as it's specific to the type of information you are trying to track.

we need to look beyond the LMS, that place that so many love to hate

“Including open in the list of examples for educational leadership is important because it brings it to the forefront. When I went up for promotion, I took a risk because engaging in open practice was not listed as an example of educational leadership, but not everyone is going to do that. Whereas if it’s strictly laid out it raises the profile for those who haven’t thought about open education and also shows that it is valued by the university as being a form of educational leadership,”

Excerpt from the UBC Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures (RPT): Evidence of educational leadership is required for tenure/promotion in the Educational Leadership stream… It can include, but is not limited to…Contributions to the practice and theory of teaching and learning literature, including publications in peer-reviewed and professional journals, conference publications, book chapters, textbooks and open education repositories / resources.

Adoption should not be ‘one-or-the-other’, instead it is a ‘horses-for-courses’ decision;

Add xAPI -> https://h5p.org/documentation/x-api Tiki should become a Learning Record Store or a FLOSS solution picked for WikiSuite.

This is what a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment is all about.

Note that Speak the Words only works in Chrome. 

connecting disparate online spaces so they relate to each other in synthesized whole

universal design

understanding how Web applications work “under the hood” and how databases and scripts interact

considering the interplay between design and content

organizing and architecting an online space

The things they learn to do in WordPress are generalizable to other systems and other online spaces

The other reason I worry about our dependence on WordPress is that we run the risk of recreating the very dynamic that Domain of One’s Own seeks to challenge

At UMW, the vast majority of our students’ work on Domain of One’s Own happens within WordPress, and increasingly I admit I worry about this.

As you all know, I’m sure, the title Domain of One’s own comes from a long essay published by Virginia Woolf in 1929.

Moodle is a modular authoring tool for courses but at this time does not create SCORM packages.

Link suggestions don’t even have to live in a separate meta box.

Here at Yoast, we are worried about the use of new technology combined with the introduction of big new concepts.

I'm not being thin-skinned, but imagine if you had a room full of people attacking your music. Well, yeah, I guess that's what being in a band is all about?!

By giving student data to the students themselves, and encouraging active reflection on the relationship between behavior and outcomes, colleges and universities can encourage students to take active responsibility for their education in a way that not only affects their chances of academic success, but also cultivates the kind of mindset that will increase their chances of success in life and career after graduation.

If students do not complete the courses they need to graduate, they can’t progress.

Ethics and privacy in learning analytics

The flexibility and social nature of how technology infuses other aspects of our lives is not captured by the model of Personalized Instruction, which focuses on the isolated individual’s personal path to a fixed end-point. To truly harness the power of modern technology, we need a new vision for educational technology (Enyedy, 2014: 16).

There is no firm evidence that adaptive learning systems are leading to better course grades or course completion.

A look at the Hype Cycle (see here for Wikipedia’s entry on the topic and for criticism of the hype of Hype Cycles) of the IT research and advisory firm, Gartner, indicates that both big data and adaptive learning have now slid into the ‘trough of disillusionment’, which means that the market has started to mature, becoming more realistic about how useful the technologies can be for organizations.

recent studies show little evidence for the effectiveness of this model of integrating technology into the learning process. 

community participation being the key to innovation

“third spaces” contribute to this new paradigm of community members as a source of innovation

user-driven approach to innovation, as opposed to the traditional user-centred approach

Overall, across the ALMAP trials, adding adaptivity to developmental and gateway courses had no effect on course completion rates after controlling for students’ initial achievement levels under any of the three possible use cases.

It’s precisely to meet these demands that Cegid recently launched a Learning Management System (LMS) specifically dedicated to Healthcare, a sector that is converting more and more to cloud-based systems.

The learning analytics and education data mining discussed in this handbook hold great promise. At the same time, they raise important concerns about security, privacy, and the broader consequences of big data-driven education. This chapter describes the regulatory framework governing student data, its neglect of learning analytics and educational data mining, and proactive approaches to privacy. It is less about conveying specific rules and more about relevant concerns and solutions. Traditional student privacy law focuses on ensuring that parents or schools approve disclosure of student information. They are designed, however, to apply to paper “education records,” not “student data.” As a result, they no longer provide meaningful oversight. The primary federal student privacy statute does not even impose direct consequences for noncompliance or cover “learner” data collected directly from students. Newer privacy protections are uncoordinated, often prohibiting specific practices to disastrous effect or trying to limit “commercial” use. These also neglect the nuanced ethical issues that exist even when big data serves educational purposes. I propose a proactive approach that goes beyond mere compliance and includes explicitly considering broader consequences and ethics, putting explicit review protocols in place, providing meaningful transparency, and ensuring algorithmic accountability. Export Citation: Plain Text (APA

The Handbook of Learning Analytics is designed to meet the needs of a new and growing field. It aims to balance rigor, quality, open access and breadth of appeal and was devised to be an introduction to the current state of research. The Handbook is a snapshot of the field in 2017 and features a range of prominent authors from the learning analytics and educational data mining research communities. The chapters have been peer reviewed by committed members of these fields and are being published with the endorsement of both the Society for Learning Analytics Research and the International Society for Educational Data Mining. We hope you will find the Handbook of Learning Analytics a useful and informative resource.

My own response has been to focus on personal analytics, but this has been a hard sell.

“Knewton is a Ferrari, but we’re in a Kia market. Ferraris require more maintenance. It’s more complicated to use Knewton.”

“The notion that adaptive technology is the reason why one school should choose one company’s content over OER (open educational resources) or other options” has become a staple of many publisher’s marketing claims, says Trace Urdan, an education market analyst.

Pearson is “investing heavily in product development and is developing its own in-house adaptive learning capability,”

CourseSmart Adds Analytics on Student E-Text Usage

In Canvas, the goal is clearly to stop anyone from having fun because everything is supposed to look exactly the same in every course everywhere all the time.

the LMS is the minivan of education. Everyone has them and needs them, but there’s a certain shame having one in the driveway.

The manager then starts writing a request for proposals. This process often starts with an email asking other campus-technology officers to share their own versions. After getting three or four of them, sometimes from wildly different types of colleges with wildly different needs, the manager may start cutting and pasting together bits from the various documents. There is a lot of pasting, but not so much cutting. Lists of requirements are added together, and then added to based on whatever the selection committee comes up with.

Learning-management systems, like any product, evolve because of a kind of natural selection — or unnatural selection, in this case.

Tsugi is a multi-tenant scalable LTI library and tool hosting environment. It is intended to make it more tractable to implement the Application Store that we will need for the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment.

A Flexible, Interoperable Digital Learning Platform: Are We There Yet? Posted on May 28, 2017 Categories:Ed Tech, Interoperability, Learning Apps, LMS & Learning Platforms Tags:IMS, IMS Caliper, Learning Platform, LMOS, LTI, NGDLE By Michael FeldsteinIn 2005, some colleagues and I had been tasked with identifying a single LMS that could serve the needs of all 64 campuses of the State University of New York—from Adirondack Community College to SUNY Stony Brook to the two medical schools. We came to the conclusion that no single LMS at the time could meet such diverse needs. We proposed instead that SUNY should build a modular system from which each campus, and indeed each educator, could create their own fit-for-purpose digital learning environment. We called this idea the Learning Management Operating System, or LMOS.

Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) As mentioned in the Medium blog, the setup for the commons was described as going in the direction described by the EDUCAUSE NGDLE report. One thing North Carolina is doing is turning the typical LMS-driven procurement approach on its head. When I asked Rascoff how the apps would be pulled together, he said that the primary plan was to set up all accepted apps with Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities. Rascoff described that since the LMS is not where learning occurs for the most part, his team is leaving that decision up to the campuses and focusing their efforts on the learning apps.

Just about every school in the US and Canada, and many across the world, has an LMS, and every LMS has a grade book. While the degree to which faculty utilize it varies greatly, it is typically one of the most utilized tools, at least for the basic purposes of communicating grades to students and the registrar. In fact, many schools require faculty to enter grades in the LMS grade book.

In the mid-1990s, largely unaware of Bloom's challenge, innovative faculty members and students at universities throughout the world began thinking about ways to leverage the Internet and the World Wide Web to improve teaching and learning. The result was the creation of a new category of web-based software: the "course management system" or CMS. Alternatively labeled learning management systems (LMSs), learning content management systems (LCMSs), and virtual learning environments (VLEs), such software has generally been focused primarily on helping teachers increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction (e.g., distribute documents, make assignments, give quizzes, initiate discussion boards, assign students to working groups, etc.). This instructor-centrism comes despite the best intentions and efforts of system designers, early adopters, and instructional support staff who sought to use these systems to transform the dominant learning modality of higher education from traditional, classroom-based instruction to online and hybrid courses. In practice, the vast majority of instructors who adopted the CMS largely ignored Bloom's challenge to make an "educational contribution of the greatest magnitude," instead focusing on increasing the administrative efficiency of their jobs.

Learning paths allow you to assemble two or more courses into a path that students must complete to trigger completion actions.

I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

Learning Analytics researchers have long held that the contexts of learning are critical in making meaningful analyses. With the large data footprint that Blackboard has to analyze, our team is able to look at some of these contexts in depth.

Could different co-teaching and collaborative course approaches or more modern pedagogical practices move the needle more than the latest LMS features? 

LMSs limit the visibility of copyrighted course content to only course participants for the duration that they need it. (Of course, this would become a moot point if using openly licensed OERs.)

Over the course of many years, every school has refined and perfected the connections LMSs have into a wide variety of other campus systems including authentication systems, identity management systems, student information systems, assessment-related learning tools, library systems, digital textbook systems, and other content repositories. APIs and standards have decreased the complexity of supporting these connections, and over time it has become easier and more common to connect LMSs to – in some cases – several dozen or more other systems. This level of integration gives LMSs much more utility than they have out of the box – and also more “stickiness” that causes them to become harder to move away from. For LMS alternatives, achieving this same level of connectedness, particularly considering how brittle these connections can sometimes become over time, is a very difficult thing to achieve.

Assessment tends to be where courses differ the most

adaptive paths available for different learner profiles

the level of effort required to completely reinvent a single online course to be adaptive

privacy controls over student data,

Ask any adjunct who teaches the same course at multiple schools with multiple LMSs.

This implies to me that an even greater cultural change is needed around what it means to be a student than a teacher.

A framework that allows individuals to innovate easily, in a sharable way, without needing permission.

introduce topic modeling to those not yet fully converted aware of its potential.

They’re powerful, widely applicable, easy to use, and difficult to understand — a dangerous combination.

Using other people's code is an important part of programming, but for group projects the code should be substantially the work of the group members except for standard libraries.

LaptopsIn order to facilitate interactive in-class work, you are allowed to bring a laptop.

"Multitasking" is a myth.

If you have a laptop, you will be expected to use it for relevant work.

Work in pairs will be encouraged.

A typical week

In writing the description of our reverse engineering work below, we deliberately avoid terms that are commonly used in Machine Learning, where labels are "true," "correct," or "gold standard." This linguistic distinction highlights the fundamentally different perspective that humanists have on classification as a tool. Our goal is not to create a system that mimics the decisions of a human annotator, but rather to better represent the porous boundaries between labels and identify the piles on which a story could have been placed over a century ago late on a cold wintry night in a dimly lit schoolhouse in eastern Jutland. We note the contrast between our use of computers to problematize existing distinctions and the common concern in the Humanities that computers deal only with binaries and black-and-white distinctions.

Our goal is not to treat existing classifications as "ground truth" labels and build machine learning tools to mimic them, but rather to use computation to better quantify the variability and uncertainty of those classifications.

Our goal with this classification method can be seen as the inverse of usual machine learning classifiers.

Computer scientists make LDA seem complicated because they care about proving that their algorithms work.

Analytics for Learn allows the analysis of teachers’ performance as well, something that will prove controversial in many institutions but will be increasingly of interest to senior managers who wish to monitor the quality of teaching in ways that were never possible in traditional classroom settings.

Bottom-up mining of patterns may reveal phenomena that nobody was predicting based on formal theory, and to which we are therefore blinded. It will be an exciting moment when an unexpected pattern in the data, discovered by an algorithm as an apparent anomaly, leads to a theoretical breakthrough.

paternalism in learning analytics (stakeholders believing they know what students need)

Be the skunk at the party. Because it’s intelligent skunks, not cheerleaders, that this field needs right now.

learning analytics are processes or procedures used to analyze student data to algorithmically predict outcomes, intervene in the learning process, and uncover patterns of learning behavior

This has much in common with a customer relationship management system and facilitates the workflow around interventions as well as various visualisations.  It’s unclear how the at risk metric is calculated but a more sophisticated predictive analytics engine might help in this regard.

watching videos of people making claims that seem odd and then executing some Google searches to see if primary materials support the claims made by smug TED lecturers

The Society to Encourage Studies at Home is a 19th century network of women who connect across the continent over the postal system

The most obvious pathway is the stepping stones aproach. Sequential in nature, it involves doing one step at a time in a prescriptive manner. See for example, Doug Belshaw’s kanban badges using Trello. Another option is where badges are a part of a collection. Like the game Trivial Pursuit, this is where several achievements are grouped together in a non-linear manner. Perscriptive in nature, collections can be linked with the completion of standards or levelling up. In contrast to perspective badge ecosystems, constellations offer a more open-ended approach where users can choose from a range of possibilities, carving out any number of pathways. This is conducive to life-long learning and offers the potential to write your own learning story. Open to borrowing from different providers, it is for this reason that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

What is important about learning pathways, is that any individual can learn what they want, when they want, how they want. In professional development and conference planning, we would talk about a common assured/shared experience. Basically, what is the one thing that someone will definitely get from this their time with us. Learning pathways takes this a step further and tries to document how and what you should learn. The purpose is that a learner might want to some guidance on what this all means, but not want a scripted curriculum.

Anyone working with the latest generation of MIDI musical instruments – like the Eigenharp, LinnStrument, ROLI Seaboard, Haken Continuum and the Madrona Soundplane – has probably encountered the work of Belgium-based programmer & electronic musician Geert Bevin.

That was the way I learned

»

We don’t know whether millennials are actually a distinctive generation.

Given all of this, it might only be a matter of time before watchmaker Fossil (FOSL) takes a write-down on its $260 million 2015 purchase of wearables firm Misfit. And unless its non-smartwatch products prove very successful, Nokia  (NOK) might struggle to make its $191 million spring acquisition of French wearables/fitness hardware maker Withings pay off.

As USB-C continues to grow in popularity, you can easily imagine the next Raspberry Pi supporting it.

make the things that you want to see in the world

Best piece I’ve seen on last week’s announcements.

uncertainty is bad news for the user base

most importantly, the co-worker is not white.

The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.

That's why BI Intelligence has spent months creating the most exhaustive resource on not just education, but the entire IoT: The Internet of Things: Examining How The IoT Will Affect The World.

But education is far from the only area of our lives that the IoT will transform. Transportation, energy, homes, healthcare, and more will all feel the touch of the IoT in the coming years.

With figures like those, it's clear that the education system isn't going away anytime soon.

company sinking its hooks into the U.S. school system

SMART boards changed the way teachers and students interacted in the classroom by moving lessons away from the dusty chalkboards that dominated education for decades.

Capterra notes that an average school spends an average of $30,000 to $50,000 per year just on paper, but reusable tech would completely eliminate that cost.

Outside of the classroom, universities can use connected devices to monitor their students, staff, and resources and equipment at a reduced operating cost, which saves everyone money.

Devices connected to the cloud allow professors to gather data on their students and then determine which ones need the most individual attention and care.

Other smartwatches force you into nightly charging.

recording of a phone call from Apple (without their consent, which is illegal in California, but apparently not in Romania).

Trump had less “fleeting interjections” this debate than the first round, and slightly more interruptions. Clinton had slightly less fleeting interjections, and the same amount of interruptions. The moderators, however, were much more active in this debate than in the first. They interjected (usually to let the candidate know they were running out of time) 41 times throughout the 90 minute debate.

In 2015, 24 percent of the oil we used was imported, but we get more of that from Canada than from all the OPEC countries combined.

The president is not a prime minister — it’s an individual making decisions, sitting atop an entire branch of government.

(I’m not condoning the stigmatization of mental illness, btw.)

In the end, your assessment of Trump’s chances comes down to the same consideration as with a falling stock: How sound are the fundamentals? Is Trump the equivalent of a beleaguered blue-chip that still has lots of hard assets?

From Holden to Kalir

(Holden, 2016a; Kalir, forthcoming)

For G Suite users in primary/secondary (K-12) schools, Google does not use any user personal information (or any information associated with a Google Account) to target ads.

You can’t say the Nexus phones don’t count just because they never succeeded.

Google has been going head-to-head against the iPhone ever since the first Android phone debuted.