I attended this event last week, I’ve got about 20 drafts at the moment so pushing this out unfinished… These are partial notes for various reasons, sorry :-).# Michael Moore, D2L big data in education theory and practice Personalisation targeted at graduation (of course, this is a standard…). Pointed out North America stats on dropouts, etc… with claim:”same results apply globally but on different scales” …except of course this isn’t true, the American system is rigged and shitty. So although the tools give a personalised grade perspective to instructors and students…these are still about exams (even if feedback of grade is more personal). Also talked about Adapted learning tool with customised learning pathways (I wrote something about this sort of thing and the OU is developing in this area here: and ) That tool also includes a sociogram for improving interactions (this is interesting). Showing a clear effect for student support POINTS raised in questions: Focus on grades not enough, issue of self-fulfilling prophecy in analytics (because students funnelled to courses suited to students like them…which is open to potential bias). Reply: 1) grades not only thing we use in model but is main outcome and recommendations are just that, not mandates, and 2) we use incoming aptitude not demographic factors in that way.# Adam Cooper from Bolton/CETIS: Actionable insights through problem definition Risk of: interventionism; centralisation/KPIs/IT management reports the BI response; reification of ‘success’ as grade; We need a participative process and to understand the skills required to interpret and engage with rich analytics Slides:# Bart Rienties Moving from learning analytics to social (emotional) learning analytics. From Surrey Learning is a social construct (it is social, and it is socially defined). IT occurs outside formal contexts. We need to think hard about what we should measure We can fail to account for artefacts, e.g. intrinsic motivation is positive and leads to digital trace (e.g. no. of posts) but no. of posts is not an intrinsic goal for us (or them), the intrinsic motivation is! Great stuff (although I’m still not 100% convinced by lots of sna networks 🙂 )# Doug Clow – funnel of participation. We need to work out what our “entry” and “exit” numbers are – sign up and pass rate are crap. THEN we should think about how to intervene to keep people going through to reduce roadblocks and increase chances of student success (inc. targeted right students to right courses).