General developer forum

Prediction is always just that, prediction, no matter how deeply rooted in current trends and stats and analysis it may be, it is still just an educated guess. I suggest that the chance of error is still close to 1. In 1939, President Roosevelt asked a "Commission of the Future" to do the same, and they missed out on penecillin and television but made rocket travel common. They also go a lot of things right btw, but who really knew?

In education though, we are struggling with the technology being thrown at us, almost daily. We thought television was going to be a great education tool, but it turned to mass entertainment, little used in education. Though the capability is still there, more so now with Discovery and Nat Geo programs widely available on DVD, it is only used very specifically in Australian classrooms. With computers, we are still struggling to fit them in, but they have already been made a little redundant or will be supplanted by mobile phones and other converging technologies.

I doubt there is any prediction that can be of any real value at this point, the field is so wide open even best guesses are going to be hugely wide of the reality. The value of these kinds of reports is that we get to see what is becoming available, and perhaps it will stimulate our interest sufficiently to investigate how we can use it in the classroom. That is about it...

Hi Tim, very interesting analysis! Thanks for sharing your blog. I have bookmarked it and will come back to visit it often...

Thanks Martin for sharing your vision about this. By the way, there is a "learning analytics" conference which they are streaming online right now. See https://tekri.athabascau.ca/analytics/

Just a quick FYI.

Wen

Thanks for the post Martin,

Is there any information out yet on Moodle's plans for learning analytics?

Here's a link to another voice on the possibilities... http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/2011/12/learning-analytics-ascilite2011-keynote/

While, we could certainly simply leave the process of sense-making from data and meaning-making from complex paths and visuals to others (think Google, Facebook, etc.) now that our movement through these digital domains we enter leave colorful strands that can be traced….  But, as educators it seems we do need to step into the conversation focusing on how we might sensitively use and shape this gathering or gathered information.  I think we do need to place ourselves as storytellers and picture interpreters in this new messy landscape. 

I'm excited to see what Moodlers can put in place.

D

This is a great example Martin, and the call from my teachers gets louder and louder for functionality like this.

Since this was posted over 2 years ago, i would really like to know your vision on this. Will it be Moodle reporting this, or will it be another program doing this for Moodle?

We are exploring options to get more out of learning analytics. I'm just in doubt which path to take: should we find someone who can build this in Moodle for us, should we find a company that builds there own app, or should we try to hook up with something like Qlikview?

Your opinion, as always, will be greatly appreciated here