I'm 32 and live in France, in a little town called Rouen (Normandy).
After being a french language teacher for 3 years, I now work as an educational technologist in a school of management. We have experienced blended and distance learning with some teachers here (with a LMS ... and it's Moodle!).
I have always thought that data from such online courses could be used in a very, very interesting way, to know more about what happened from the student's perspective.
But I have no background in statistics or data mining. I just play with my logs files and Microsoft Excel, until I find something interesting
So I'm glad to be part of this collaborative learning experience, this is a great opportunity to know more about the concepts, tools and trends of learning analytics, and to share points of view.
To me this course will be a success if I can interact with people from various workplaces/positions (even if english isn't very accurate), if I can get a deeper understanding of the information that can be revealed by learning analytics and if I can know what are the emerging technologies behind all of this. I hope that I will be useful for the others during these six weeks.
I would like to thank George Siemens and the other facilitators for setting up this learning experience!
Matthieu