LAK vs EDM vs Educational Research

Re: LAK vs EDM vs Educational Research

by Apostolos Koutropoulos -
Number of replies: 1
It's an interesting question indeed!

I think that the underlying methods/tools that are used in EDM and LAK are probably similar. You develop models, programs and queries to mine through a large corpus of data to get some result.

I think that where EDM and LAK are different is the intended audience of the data output. It seem to me that LAK is geared toward the educator and the team that the educator works with (principally instructional designers and educational specialists I'd say). LAK seems more classroom oriented.

EDM on the other hand seems more like understanding students at the macro level (how they take courses, in what sequence, which courses are generally taken together, etc). I'd say that EDM is more like the Google Latitude of learning analytics
In reply to Apostolos Koutropoulos

Re: LAK vs EDM vs Educational Research

by Ryan Baker -
One surprising thing across these comments (to me) is the claim that EDM is about understanding students at the macro level, and looks at assessment data rather than transaction-level data. I'd say that the opposite is true of most (80%, say?) EDM research. EDM research is typically quite micro (as with the models of gaming the system and off-task behavior I talked about), and all about fine-grained data.

However, I definitely agree that EDM's focus has not historically been on the educator. It has been on the curriculum developer, and the learning scientist. There are definitely exceptions (like Neil Heffernan's work). So that is a potential difference on focus.

As for whether EDM and LAK should be the same community (a comment I saw in another post). I think that they two communities have emerged separately -- so far -- for plausible reasons (different backgrounds of researchers and different focuses, despite different purviews). I do think there's value in multiple venues -- conferences, journals -- for different perspectives to emerge. I think education research is plenty big for both communities, especially with all of the potential coming out of "big data" in education.

Cheers
Ryan