My name is Michael Paskevicius I am originally from Toronto, Canada and am currently studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I am pursuing my masters in education, with a focus on the use of learning technologies. I work in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT on a project which aims to assist academics in creating electronic learning materials to share as open educational resources.
We use Google Analytics (GA) to track our online elearning content keeping an eye on number of visits, hits on content, visitor location, time on site, and exit points. Our content creators are quite keen to see that their resources are being accessed throughout the world. Unfortunately we can’t yet tell them what exactly they are being used for, unless we get a comment or some follow up.
We actively monitor our search logs to see what people are searching for when they visit our websites. Whether it is students from our university or others around the world, it is really remarkable reviewing the types of content people expect (or hope) to find on our site. A few weeks back we started to see a number of searches for 'referencing', 'citation guide' so we worked with our library to make their already online citation guide open content with a Creative Commons license. I think there is a space for predictive analytics wherever search is conducted. Certainly in the library where students often begin with search, we could be using that data to predict patterns in the way resources are used.
I have engaged with a couple of MOOC's, and I find that engaging with the weekly resources and discussions usually prompts a reflexive blog post. IMO the course will be a success if the participants take the time to reflect on the content and discussion (myself included)
I tweet here: http://twitter.com/mpaskevi
Looking forward to the discussion with the group!
I'll be blogging from http://bluelightdistrict.org/