I asked this question but unfortunately there was no time for answering. It regards the fact that learning is not constrained to only the school or university: this is not sustainable or realistic. People interact on forums and other learning environments, such as Cramster, StackOverflow, Quora, Wikipedia, Hypios, etc. Isn't it time that institutions go and start hosting these kinds of environments and develop standards for measuring learning activity? I think that if this is the case, these environments need to be more open than a traditional LMS, allowing anyone to add anyone (institutions have less control). What kind of analytics do we need to control quality of content and assessment of learning activities?
Hi Thieme,
Agree, that learning happens in lots of places outside the set education spaces and teachers and assessors need to understand what is happening. I agree that it is not sustainable to try to prevent this nor is it beneficial for student learning.
I'm not sure the answer is for institutions to replicate all of these site, although it may be appropriate in some instances.
As far as what needs to be tracked. I think it depends on the situation but the author and content with an assessment lens (obviously). I am currently undertaking a project that looks at the function of post, which hopefully sheds light on purpose of the post and the effectiveness of the learning community.
One last thing, I also wonder whether rather than tracking what students do, they submit their distributed content?
Richard
Agree, that learning happens in lots of places outside the set education spaces and teachers and assessors need to understand what is happening. I agree that it is not sustainable to try to prevent this nor is it beneficial for student learning.
I'm not sure the answer is for institutions to replicate all of these site, although it may be appropriate in some instances.
As far as what needs to be tracked. I think it depends on the situation but the author and content with an assessment lens (obviously). I am currently undertaking a project that looks at the function of post, which hopefully sheds light on purpose of the post and the effectiveness of the learning community.
One last thing, I also wonder whether rather than tracking what students do, they submit their distributed content?
Richard
One last thing, I also wonder whether rather than tracking what students do, they submit their distributed content
What is the difference?
I understand the difference between tracking and submiting, but what is the difference you are intending to make?
What is the difference?
I understand the difference between tracking and submiting, but what is the difference you are intending to make?
We can track by using a browser plugin or by asking students to provide a list of the online services they use. In this way we'd track all of their activity, assuming there wasn't a pause button. Consider how the netvibes page for this course displays all the posts for the blogs present regardless of whether they are actually about the course.
Students could alternatively submit content by using a submit button, similar to the facebook "like" button, inserted by a plugin. They could use a specific tag eg lak11 or the could link back to a course URL, assuming their content is crawled by google.
I'd suggested a submitted system may look more like a portfolio than a LMS. Submitting rather than tracking may limit the type of data you can track.
Love to hear what others think about this.
Students could alternatively submit content by using a submit button, similar to the facebook "like" button, inserted by a plugin. They could use a specific tag eg lak11 or the could link back to a course URL, assuming their content is crawled by google.
I'd suggested a submitted system may look more like a portfolio than a LMS. Submitting rather than tracking may limit the type of data you can track.
Love to hear what others think about this.
Thieme, I think your point is extremely important but not so much because other people use sites generally labelled 'learning' but because the huge number of part-time/block-release/distance+work students tend to use home-life social media and work-life systems to conduct their studies and find interacting with a centralised LMS a real scheduling issue. Whether the LMS could or even should link to all other communication systems is another matter.
Just to give an example of such an environment: The Industrial Design faculty at our university (Delft University of Technology) hosts a community wiki where all theories and lessons concerning design are managed. This is truly a community site for both professionals in the field, researchers, and students. It is, from an educational perspective, interesting to see what people bring into these kinds of environments, what they contribute, and accredit them for it. What kind of analytics should we cover in order to give a trustworthy account of someone's value (or expertise)?
The link: http://www.wikid.eu/index.php/WikID:Community_portal
PS. To me it is clear that only a ranking based on number of contributions (as it seems to do) is insufficient. We need to analyze the actual value of contributions/edits with algorithms such as the WikiTrust algorithm.
The link: http://www.wikid.eu/index.php/WikID:Community_portal
PS. To me it is clear that only a ranking based on number of contributions (as it seems to do) is insufficient. We need to analyze the actual value of contributions/edits with algorithms such as the WikiTrust algorithm.
Agree.
It's not the quantity, it's the quality [combined with quantity, I guess]
But can a machine do that?
It's not the quantity, it's the quality [combined with quantity, I guess]
But can a machine do that?
We' have recently manually coded 1300 posts from an online teacher professional development community - would be great if a computer could have done it! Maybe?