Learning Analytics

The following is taken from Tony Bate's blog

I include it here as it supports well our work with live data.  We are using Analytics already but it is entirely used as a tool to support Teaching and Learning.  More specifically, we use it to put in place clear feedback channels between students and teachers.  Think of it as embracing Hattie's research by making radical use of data.


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Original link

2. Learning analytics: 90% probable
Learning analytics enable easy access to data on the desktop or tablet for instructors, administrators and even students about how students are learning and the factors that appear to influence their learning. The rapid expansion of learning analytics in 2012 is probably going to be the biggest surprise for many people outside the small coterie of people currently using learning analytics. Again, this is not likely to explode in 2012, but it will gain traction quite quickly, and again, there are strong reasons behind this prediction:

• the biggest driver is going to be appeals and accreditation. Learning analytics enable institutions (and those appealing grades) to access hard ‘evidence’ of student performance, particularly online. Institutions can demonstrate to accreditation agencies what and how students have learned through the use of learning analytics. These may not be the best reasons for using analytics, but they are a very powerful ones, especially as quality assurance boards start latching on to learning analytics.
• LMSs will increasingly provide the software necessary as part of the standard service
• identifying ‘at-risk’ students. There is growing evidence that at-risk students can be identified almost within the first week of a course through indicators that can be tracked through learning analytics, such as amount of activity in an online class, response to e-mails, etc. The challenge will then be to find ways of supporting at-risk students
• tweaking teaching; learning analytics provide instructors with useful data about how and what students are learning, enabling quick changes to materials and to teaching approaches while the course is still running
• course review and planning: learning analytics will improve the evidence for both internal and external course reviews and future course planning.

Likely barriers:

• identifying and collecting the data in ways that are useful for decision-making
• concerns about student privacy
• data overload for instructors who are already busy
• lack of integration between LMSs and other student information systems

Grounded theory: Mapping live data and linking it to intervention

Set your hypothesis regarding why you are not performing as you ought to.  Then have a look at your data which has gone through so many layers of crunching, all the important facets of this data has been homogenised into an unrecognisable slush.  You can use to fit your hypothesis anyway but, as you well know, all this data and money spent on data crunching is having no impact on results.

So forget about hypothesis first and data after and go for data first and then work out what hypothesis you can come up with based on the original data, the data which is directly linked to achievement.

Welcome to the grounded theory, or grounded approach.

Use academic student surveys, map it all and then see what is probably wrong...and do something about it.  The data will take care of itself.

From Axial Coding to selective coding, this is the way to release the power of data..

There you are, a clash of the real world and the theoretical world.  Tomato/ tomato...  Then again, I would probably say tomate!

Get in touch if you want revolutionise your data flows and use them to improve results.

Executive Judgment in E Strategy

One of the main strategic challenges for organizations today is to effectively manage change and stay competitive in the future. Change appears to be the only constant in contemporary business and is present in every industry and in every country (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998). Moreover, the key area of importance, current within many organizations, is how to effectively leverage technology within such a complex and dynamic business environment (Sauer & Willcocks, 2003). The alignment or fit approach, which has its roots in contingency theory, has long been promoted as the way to get high returns from technology investment. However, the realization of advantage from the Internet and related [...] technology investment has long been a source of frustration for corporate executives.  [...] Many executives view the Internet and related [...] technologies with intense frustration. They recollect investment in the great speculative bubble of the 1990s and excessive expenditure on year 2000 (Y2K) compliant systems (Keen, 2002). They recall high profile examples of botched enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that have consistently run over time and budget and report that customer-relationship management (CRM) initiatives were largely a flop (Reinartz & Chugh, 2002). Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how firms should go about capturing the potential that exists, as few normative frameworks exist to guide practitioner investment. 

Based on IGI 

OLAP is Dead (Long Live Analytics)

Posted by Timo Elliott on Friday, November 27, 2009 · 12 Comments 

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

The term OLAP or Online Analytic Processing was coined in 1993 by relational database technology pioneer Ted Codd (my claim to fame: we went to the same high school, Poole Grammar).
The term was chosen to contrast with OLTP or online transaction processing, and was prompted by some clever marketing folks at Essbase, who wanted to promote their multidimensional database product. Codd was famous for his twelve rules defining the relational model and duly came up with twelve rules for analytic systems.
The term was quickly taken up by the rest of the industry, and spawned new definitions (Nigel Pendse’s FASMI test) and multiple variations (MOLAP, HOLAP, ROLAP, Huey, Dewie and Louie, etc.).
Over time, these multiple definitions started muddying the meaning of the term (was it a technology? a user interface? an approach to analysis?), and Gartner decreed that it was ‘just’ part of a larger market called business intelligence. The result has been a long slow decline of the use of the term OLAP, as the Google Trends chart below indicates.

Only Nigel Pendse of the OLAP Report tried to side-step this trend, and continued producing OLAP-specific analysis for many years, but “business intelligence” was clearly the mainstream industry term. A few years ago, Nigel sold the OLAP Report to the German BARC group, who initially continued under the same name, and tried vainly to convince everybody that OLAP was still a “hip term”, but finally succumbed to the inevitable and announced last month that they would be changing the name of the report/site to The BI Verdict.
(Sadly, at some point in this process, BARC decided to lock one of Nigel’s best articles — “How not to buy a BI product” – behind their subscription firewall. All I can find on the web is a far-less-entertaining summary of the main points here. [UPDATE: thanks to a tip from Florian Bahr, I can point you to the full article on the WayBackMachine: How not to buy an OLAP product)
Since BARC were the last group using the term with any frequency, it’s now fairly safe to say that OLAP’s days are over, but interestingly, the group seems to have chosen to shift to the wrong term. The chart below shows that the search trend for “business intelligence” has been slowly drifting down over the last five years.

And the decline is even more pronounced for another standard industry term, “performance management”

Since BI and performance management remain fast-growing markets, this trend is a little surprising – until you look at the search figures for the term analytics. Starting in 2005 (perhaps prompted by the introduction of Google Analytics?), the term has skyrocketed in use.

Possible reasons for this may include:

• Popular books and articles aimed as business people tend to use the term, such as Thomas Davenport’s 2007 book “Competing on Analytics”. This is perhaps because there’s more ambiguity for a business audience, who associate the term “business intelligence” with industry data vendors like Reuters and Thomson (now both part of the same company).
• The acquisition of the mainstream BI vendors by larger organizations (Hyperion by Oracle, Cognos by IBM, and BusinessObjects by SAP) has meant that the industry has been increasingly using other, more generic terms, such as “embedded analytics” and “analytic applications” to explain the same functionality. And the largest remaining independent vendor, SAS, has proclaimed themselves the leader in “business analytics”

My conclusion? By the time you read this, this blog might well be called “Analytic Questions” instead of “BI Questions”…

A Headteacher (S. Wheeler) writes

Source: http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/12/head-teacher-writes.html

We have had pencils in our school now for some time, and we were one of the first to adopt them, but it has been an uphill struggle. There aren't enough to go around, and often several of the children have to crowd around to use the pencils at the same time. But we are better off than many schools. We have a well equipped pencil suite where the chained desktop pencils are used in special sessions, and often, as a reward for good behaviour children are allowed to come into the suite (under teacher supervision of course) to use the pencils to draw fun things.

Pencils were resisted by some of the teachers at first, because they complained they would have to change their practice if they adopted them. And they were right, pencils are in fact a game changer. Others were worried that they would not have enough time to learn to use them properly. 


I have a wider vision than a pencil suite for our school. I'm considered a bit of a maverick and many of my staff look at me and shake their heads sadly. You see, I have a vision for pencils that I think will transform our school and enhance learning for all our students. Wait for it - I am advocating one pencil for every child in the school! And even more radical than that, I want to introduce pencils that can be used by students while they are on the move. Yes, I know it sounds absurd, but I think it will work. Needless to say, I have had many objections and lots of opposition from all quarters.

Some teachers, led by our school pencil co-ordinator, have complained that we made a considerable investment on the pencil suite, and it's being used regularly for very important teaching. OK, so there is only one pencil between every four children, but at least the pencils are being used consistently, she argues. Some occasionally break and have to be sent away to be fixed, but we also have a parent who is familiar with pencils, and has one at home. He comes in occasionally to fix them, which saves us some money. 


My idea is for the school to invest more money so that each child can walk around while using their pencils, and that they can even take them home with them! Yes, I know it's an extremely radical idea, and that's the very reason I am receiving so much opposition. Some of my teaching staff are arguing that we could better spend the money on more chalk for the blackboards. Others are warning that children will either damage the pencils or worse, lose them if they take them out of the school. Pencils are meant to be used for education, they say, not for fun.

Even the parents are complaining. Some have written a very strong letter to the governors, suggesting that if we give a pencil to each of the children to bring home, they will need to revise their home contents insurance, in case any disaster occurs, and the child damages the pencil in some way. Some of the richer families don't seem to mind, as they have better pencils at home than we could possibly buy for the school. It's a kind of pencil envy I suppose. There does seem to be a pencil divide across the local community. I am confident though that giving one pencil to each student will address this problem.

Then there are the objections from the Tax Payers Alliance, and other pressure groups who have even gone on to the local TV station to complain that we are being irresponsible, and are wasting valuable tax payers money on purchasing a pencil for every child. 'In my day', said the TPA spokeperson, 'we used slates and styluses, and shared them around, and we were happy. One pencil per child is simply a gimmick'. To be blunt, I think they are missing the point. I strongly believe that pencils are the future of learning, and the more untethered they are, the greater will be the flexibility of learning for all subjects across the curriculum.

One of the strongest arguments from some of my teaching staff though is that they claim to be pencil immigrants, while the children are pencil natives. The kids seem to have such an affinity with the pencils, whilst the staff struggle to use them and get embarrassed when they accidentally use the wrong end, or the point is blunt, and they don't know how to sharpen it. Some teacher have warned that increased use of the pencil can be addictive, and will cause all sorts of problems such as writer's cramp, eye strain, raised incidences of graffiti in the school toilets and rude cartoons of teachers passed around the room. Such dangers though, are far outweighed by the benefits of mobile, personalised pencils.

So we will forge on with my new one child, one pencil scheme, and as a school, we will make it work. We will actually purchase the new second generation (2G) pencils, which have erasers attached, and in so doing, these multi-functional tools will offer a revolutionary approach to learning. They are also much faster and last longer than the old pencils. I will close with this inspirational quote: 'Any teacher who can be replaced by a pencil... should be! - Arthur C. Chalk.

(Inspired by the Twitter #pencilchat hashtag)

Image source


A head teacher writes... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

QA? Get real...

Baroness bemoans ‘poorly focused’ efforts to measure quality

 

19 October 2011

By Matthew Reisz
 

A former president of the British Academy has argued that universities are subject to “elaborate forms of accountability that reveal little about how effectively students are taught or how much they learn on different courses”.

Philosopher Onora O’Neill was speaking on “University and Diversity” at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities earlier this week, as part of a 10th-anniversary lecture series on “The Idea of the University”.

Today’s “standard systems for assessing what is described as the quality of universities”, argued Baroness O’Neill, tended to rely on “rather abstract features of universities”.

These included the proportion of their activity that is laboratory-based, the proportion of students who are “residential” and the proportion who are mature, she said.

Largely ignored, however, were “many matters of substantive educational and cultural significance”.
By way of example, Baroness O’Neill noted out that “although we learn how many overseas students each university recruits - supposedly a great indicator of academic success and reputation, and hitherto a genuine indicator of financial success – [standard measures] say nothing about the proportion of their entering or exiting students who are competent users of any second language…It is striking that something that so evidently bears on the work they can do at university and beyond should not be recorded or reported, but passed over in silence when university quality is publicly judged.”

Similarly, she continued, “there is no attempt to judge or record how well the students on any given course can interpret or criticise demanding texts, or how fluently they can write in varied and demanding registers, or how far they have developed their understanding of ethical, social or religious issues”.

She concluded the lecture by calling for “more specific and substantive forms of accountability, that would actually aim to judge the quality of education provided and achieved”.
matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com

The skills based curriculum

The drive for a skills based curriculum is more and more prevalent.  How to deliver such curriculum remains a challenge for a number of schools.

The key to success is not logistics.

Two main structures support such drive.  In one structure, the skill based curriculum is about mapping where the fundamental skills are delivered.  It is a hidden skill based curriculum.  This is the way to deliver the least changes in the 'traditional' curriculum.  The key to success here is always whether this brand of curriculum is driven by the teachers (Cross-curriculum work anyone?) or by a manager in his/ her office.  You can guess which one is more successful.

The other more honest structure represents the traditional 'circle within a circle approach'.  The Welsh Bac and International Bac both use this structure to explain their curriculum.  Put the core skills in the middle, surround them by the curriculum and you are done.  It will work with the IB because they make sure it will.  It will work with the Welsh Bac as it is integrated in the assessment structure.

It does not always work when this circle is mirrored elsewhere.  The key to success here is always a management issue.  Does the management give itself the means to implement their skill based curriculum?  When it represents just a fad or a marketing ploy, the skills which are supposedly at the heart of the curriculum are in fact peripheral to it.  It is a traditional curriculum with added 'bits'.  Whilst the departments (in secondary education) are mostly run as tight ships, the skills area is run by whoever is unlucky enough to be volunteered and delivered by whoever is available.  It is a 'left over' approach.  Surprisingly this has little impact on results (because it does not really improve any skill).

If you are not in the market for the IB or Welsh Bac, you could do a lot worse than considering the EPQ as a cornerstone of your skill based curriculum post 16.  The experience you will gain there will easily be transferable  to KS3 and 4 later on.  The project approach can be tailored to your curriculum needs and the support it requires can be integrated within the pastoral support. It can easily be the central component of your curriculum around which organise themselves the different curriculum areas.  This will easily evolve in line with what your school requires, but at least you start from a solid base.

You get your circle within a circle curriculum and the skills are clearly at the core.

Procurement?

• Cut down exam costs by getting rid of exams used as practice: check.
• Feed-in tariffs going down until 2014 make solar energy not the obvious choice it might appear: it all depends on how your LEA sees hiring out your roofs: not a straight forward check.
• Electricity/ Gaz:  Did you know a company can tout your business around and ask the main suppliers to bid for your business.  The bidding itself does not cost you anything: check
• Refuse:  ethical refuse collection can be the green way forward, and cheaper: check

Effective e-Learning

If you follow this site, you will have been integrating your interactive exercises with your SOWs and therefore into the feedback loop (3D mapping) for a long time.  Check this out from Microsoft HE blog

Kingswoodonline update 15/09/11

The content of all classes on Kingswoodonline will be removed from last year's classes and merged into groups.  This will be done by late 15th September.

On the 16th September the new classes will be uploaded.

As soon as this is done the content from the groups will re-populate all the relevant classes KP wide.  This will be done by the 21st September.  On the 21st and 22nd all relevant students will receive their new passwords via letters.

Intelligent data

Having a quick look at IBM's  approach to data analysis (David Loshin, March 2011), it is quite obvious that the education world is not  dealing with the growth of unstructured data in the way businesses do.  


Whereas businesses are developing competitive business intelligence solutions, schools either reach "analysis paralysis" or chose the data they want to support a gut feeling decision.

Data is about delivering actionable intelligence and yet most schools are still dealing with posthumous data.  Data that reports on the past.  Schools must move on to the analytics sphere to develop strategies that will drive student progress forward (at least!).  

Reports have to focus on what needs to be done in order to achieve.

The result of predictive analytics formulated as actionable intelligence can be integrated directly into the existing reporting process by synchronising data from different sources:
•SOWs
•Specifications
•Class based assessments
•vLe interactive exercises results

This requires a robust architecture tuned to the framework for reporting.   It must be coherent and this has a direct impact on how raw data is mined.   It is all about delivering actionable intelligence.  It requires an architecture which enables a continuous synchronization of data from multiple sources. 

Alternatively it requires you to bring the functionality of your SIMS database to the 21st century rather than going on automating 20th century processes. 

Do not use your data manager to crunch data, use him/her to deliver processes which will deliver data at any time.  Get him/ her to bring SIMS into the 21st century.

Intelligent data is what it is all about.

By adding multidimensional data analysis to this architecture schools will be able to link another set of data sources:
•Class/ teacher results
•Contextual results
•SOWs
•Line manager
•INSET/ CPD record
•Examiners report

Rather than creating more data, this technique identifies patterns.  Patterns are a good foundation to drive organizational optimization (as IBM puts it).

This optimization is driven by a series of questions:
•What?  Use multidimensional mapping to see what is what.  If you deal with student progress, where are they?
•Why?  Why are those patterns present?  Why are students under-achieving?
•What if? This is where managed innovation comes in
•What next? What is the objective?
•How? What needs to be done to meet this objective

Opening the way to analytics will open the door to profiling.  This will enable schools to model student progress in different situations...   Profiling will enable you to predict problems and make sure they do not occur.  

The really amazing thing is that these tools are here right now.  They are not magic.  Businesses have been using them for a while. The key issue is management.  Is management  ready to let analytics rip and present them with a real picture of their school?

As usual, the answer has nothing to do with technology.  It is about managers lowering their guard in order to be able to...learn.

Click view/ Clip bank or GCSE pods?

Multimedia:

• Click view is about recording what is on TV.  Make sure you also buy the 24/7 box.  Once the material is recorded centrally (who will run this? You need to make it part of someone's job description), you then need the teachers to integrate the resource in their SOW.  There is a lot of development time needed here.  If your processes of teaching and learning are solid, worth considering.  Only for those with good SOWs and who use TV recordings as a matter of course.  If not, after the initial 3 months, it will not be used as much as the money spent on it warrants it.
• Clip bank uses tv programmes but they are already integrated within the specs, have exercises, transcripts etc...  It is very teacher friendly and all the resources can be made accessible overnight.  The way forward if you have little or no multimedia content.  Can be integrated into your vLe.
• GCSE pods are revision podcasts.  They are directed straight at the students.  Again, they can be used overnight.  Quick fix if you don't have anything in-house.

Tech stack for tomorrow?

Talking about the tech stack of the near future  This is how analytics will take off.  Can you see the hint of the magical element?

The A level Sociology heaven?

Check the link for Sociology resources. I think you might like some of it...

http://www.sociology.org.uk/rsoft.htm