Now that some of the dust from the VLE transition to Learn Ultra is starting to settle, many of us in EDE have caught our collective breath and have a few minutes to look more deeply into other aspects of our VLE and its associated learning tools and platforms.    The transition to Learn Ultra […]

On 8th May the University of Edinburgh welcomed around 40 people from across the UK for this meeting. As with previous JISC networking days, there was lots of time for interaction and discussion, and the variety of morning’s speakers provided plenty to discuss. The notes here are my personal take-away points from the day. Niall […]

Those of you who have read my previous posts on this blog will know that I am creating student progress ‘dashboards’ as part of a learning analytics pilot for one of our online Masters programmes. Alongside release of these dashboards to students, a questionnaire was sent to all first and second year students on-programme (around […]

With so many graphics software applications now available, it’s never been easier to turn complex data sets into interactive charts, maps, and infographics. However, using contemporary visuals to represent and understand big data often raises the question, “That looks nice… but, what exactly is it meant to show?”Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualization.png?uselang=en-gb Performing an internet search on ‘data […]

In March this year, I began a secondment to Information Services (one day-a-week) in which I shall be evaluating the impact of learning analytics data on students’ academic performance. The courses I am involved with are all online, part-time Masters programmes, delivered via bespoke virtual learning environments (http://www.essqchm.rcsed.ac.uk/). We enrol around 400 students annually which allows […]

Learning Analytics has rapidly become a “hot topic” in Higher Education. Our teaching and  learning activities online now generate “big data” and there is a need to manage and understand that data, to make best use of it at national, local, institutional and school level.  All sorts of work is being done on developing this […]