I teach six sections (4 primary/junior, 2 junior/intermediate) of an undergraduate (B.Ed.) educational technology course called 80-312 and 80-322 Learning with Technologies. With some help and guidance from colleagues including Richard Reeve, Don Philip, and Kim MacKinnon, I adapted a syllabus that Zuochen Zhang has been teaching junior/intermediate and senior sections in the consecutive B.Ed. program.

It’s going pretty well. I have just over 200 students, and they are impressing me with their technology demonstrations of OSAPAC software and other software like Scratch and Alice that are free. They’ve been presenting their demos using a Smartboard in a computer lab. The students are a good bunch. Most recently, I was thrilled to have some students exceed my expectations by collecting original, relevant data to use in their demonstrations of Tinkerplots, a dynamic data visualization software. Pretty neat!

In terms of teaching graduate students, I’m in the process of designing an online graduate course on designing e-learning environments. I’ll blog more about that shortly, but I’m excited to be thinking about design and selecting readings on what is design, design-based research, design patterns, design thinking, designerly ways of knowing, etc.

On the research front, I’ve gotten research ethics board approval for collecting data in my classes for an online formative assessment project using Facebook. It’s an extension of the repertory grid work that I was doing with Chris in Copenhagen on FARGO. Whereas one does not need to obtain ethics clearance at the Copenhagen Business School to collect data, it is required in Canada, and it took a little longer to obtain approval at University of Windsor than I have been used to at University of Toronto. It took just one revision, as per usual, but I think it was a timing issue–the university is pretty quiet in the summer as faculty take vacations, so there was likely a backlog for the review board. Hence, I couldn’t start collecting data at the beginning of the year as I had hoped. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get this project started once students return from their first practicum in a couple of weeks.

I’m also working on a SSHRC Insight Development grant application. While I’ve worked on lots of grant applications as a graduate student or a postdoc, it’s the first one that I’m preparing as a faculty member. I’m feeling much more confident about grant writing after recent successful experiences. I attended a workshop in October by Jo Van Every, which was useful. I’ve been busy putting publications in the pipeline so that some of them will be published or at least accepted by the time the grant is due on Feb 1, 2012. So far, I’ve signed off on two ACM proceedings and a journal article, so things are looking pretty good. I hope to complete drafts of a couple of chapters that I owe some editors, too. Now I just have to keep the momentum going during cold & flu season and with the holidays coming up! Yikes!

While in Hong Kong for the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 2011) conference, I received a job offer to become Assistant Professor in E-Learning in the Faculty of Education at University of Windsor, in Windsor, Ontario. This was an exciting moment for me, as I was able to announce this appointment the next day in the last six seconds of my three minute fire hose presentation to mentors and colleagues in the Early Career and Postdoc Workshop (ECW) on 4 July, 2011!

Although I am really enjoying my postdoctoral research on Prof. Reimann’s large scale EC-funded ICT (FP 7) project called NEXT-TELL , I could not pass up this opportunity to return to Canada and work in a Faculty of Education at a research university in Ontario. As I learned in the ECW, there are many talented learning scientists with PhDs on the market. The current job market is a tough one. I feel very fortunate to have landed this job that allows me to continue to extend research in my area of expertise.

This means, however, that my family and I have to move yet once again! This represents the ninth move in the past three years for my partner, daughter, dog, and I. We’ve moved three times in the last six months in Copenhagen alone, as we shuffled around various temporary faculty residences. We’ve lived in three different countries during this time–Canada, France, and Denmark. We’ve traveled a lot for work, too. We’ve most recently braved long flights with a two year old to Hong Kong and back, but we’ve been to Finland, Switzerland, France, Norway, Germany, U.S., and to the West Coast of Canada. Before we leave Denmark, we’ll probably head over to Sweden. When I began my journey into academia, I had no idea that I would be jet-setting around the globe with a partner who is another academic (and a leader in the same field, to boot), a child and a dog! So much for the envisioned quiet life in the ivory tower with summers off. I also didn’t expect to live in foreign countries where I could not make sense of the language. My French was passable enough for Parisiens to think I was a local albeit with an English accent, but Danish is a very difficult language to learn. I’m looking forward to living in a country where I can actually understand the street signs or packaging on products.

We’re still looking for a place to live in Windsor, but we’re now working with a real estate agent who will hopefully find us a more permanent home. It’s been a number of years in the making since I began my doctoral journey, but I’m now living the dream of becoming a professor and educational researcher. Many people have characterized me as being “goal-oriented” or “driven.” I guess they were right. It’s always been my goal to be a professor who conducts leading-edge research, teaches preservice and graduate students, and contributes to the community, academic and otherwise!

Nowadays, I can’t do what I always used to do early on in my doctoral journey, which is take notes on each article (and I would read about two full journal articles a day) in a Word file saved as “Notes_AuthorYear” that I stored in a Folder called “Notes.” I would also diligently paste the text of the notes into the “Notes” section in my EndNote database. That means I had already manually entered the article’s citation info into the EndNote database. Back then, I used to print out PDFs and so I could jot down notes in the margins and paperclip a printed copy of my notes on top of my printed copy of the article. I would file that in a physical manila folder and file them in a drawer. If the article pertained to something of great interest to me, for e.g. design-based research or knowledge building, then the article and notes would get filed into its dedicated topic D-ring binder. Later, as I wrote up sections of my thesis, conference paper, or publication, I would maybe group these articles/notes into piles sorted by topic and labeled by post-it note. As I wrote, I would turn to these notes and sometimes copy and paste direct citations that I had set aside for this purpose from my Word file on the article.

All this paper meant that wherever I traveled, I carried around a big stack of articles. This was known as a “graduate student affliction” among the GRAIL team (Clare, Wendy, and I). Wendy and I felt compelled to carry around several articles in our knapsacks at all times, just in case we had a moment to read and review articles on our travels. Eventually, the weight of these articles became cumbersome, especially when traveling to international conferences with laptop, adaptors for different electric voltages, dongles, LCD projector, and other paraphernalia. Also, as I moved from a three bedroom house in the country to an apartment in downtown Toronto, I simply ran out of room to store my many banker boxes of articles and notes.

These days, I tend to read my PDFs on the fly as I work on various projects and papers, usually on very tight timelines. I read, in parallel, an enormous number of articles on myriad topics in vastly different fields. It doesn’t feel as satisfying as reading and taking notes on one article at a time. However, I can pull out the most important bits from each article much faster and write a concise line or two expressing the essence of the article in whatever I’m writing and move on to the next thing. I find PDFs in various ways. I might Google Scholar or search on Web of Knowledge. This lets me import citation info into EndNote, along with the abstract, DOI, link to library direct access to full text, etc. When I have the PDFs, I upload them to Dropbox which is organized into different project folders to share with colleagues in the office or around the world and also so that we can access them from different devices. I rarely print out PDFs, but rather read them using Skim on my MacBook Pro and PDF Expert on my iPad.

At work, I have a rather large monitor that I plug my 15″ laptop into, which means that I can have the PDF open (among many other things) on one screen as I write on the other screen. I have experimented with taking notes or annotating PDFs in DEVONthink, but I still find it easier to write notes in Word (as much I despise MS Word) using EndNote cite while you write because I prefer to have my notes ready to paste into whatever manuscript I’m writing. I’m pretty disciplined about filing my PDFs into appropriate project folders (e.g., a particular paper, lit search in a particular area, etc.) when I download an article. I have a strict naming convention of “AuthorYear” and am fortunate to have a remarkable recall for citations so I can usually find the article I’m looking for when I need it, even if I’ve misfiled it somehow. I tried to put everything into DEVONthink, but got lazy when I was on some tight timelines, and now I really have to get back into that routine for work.

At home, I really like reading on my iPad. I’m not normally so taken by gadgets, though I still do quite like my iPhone, but my relationship to my iPad is–how shall I put this–bordering on obsessive. Even when I am reading work-related material, I find it much more enjoyable to read things on this tablet device! I have ordered a stylus, but it hasn’t arrived, so I still haven’t experimented with writing notes or drawing, but I am looking forward to sketching designs on the iPad a great deal. I know a number of CSCL people who have Kindles, and I can see the appeal of a smaller device for just reading, but I like being able to do other things on the iPad. As an academic parent to a small child, I don’t really have a lot of time for pleasure reading (i.e., fiction), but I do indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading an article or two from the New Yorker when I have a spare moment to myself. I think I’d still prefer to read a paper copy of the magazine, but I have become much closer to the paperless office approach. Less clutter is a good thing, but I wish I could organize files a bit better on the iPad.

The reason I asked for these resources is because it dawned on Chris and me that one way to think about an open learner model (OLM) is to think of them as report cards with clear representations of a student’s learning progress. So instead of the usual numbers or letter grades displayed in tabular format, a parent can see at a glance how their child is doing, relative to their class, and on a particular concept. The reason it’s called “open” is that the child can see how they are doing themselves, which aids in engaging their metacognition for 21st century learning, and so that the various stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, etc.) can discuss the learning progression (or lack thereof). As NEXT-TELL is a formative assessment project, our focus is to design a usable interface that works in real time so teachers can make pedagogical decisions to assess for learning, hopefully to evaluate more often than twice a year, which is how often students receive report cards here in Denmark. I still have to pour through these resources, but I hope they will serve as a springboard from which we work on some customized interfaces in the next couple of weeks.

One of the exciting developments in working towards a communication and negotiation layer for the OLM is our work using repertory grids. We had a chance to run a little pilot study with some Danish teachers on their thoughts about different kinds of formative assessment about three weeks ago. This generated a couple of interesting visualizations that we shared with our NEXT-TELL partners on our Facebook page. We got some enthusiastic feedback so far on these from the researchers’ perspective, but now we are customizing the interface in response to feedback from the teachers’ perspective. As usual, we’re finally gaining steam on the research front, but the school year is already winding down! Such is the challenge for a design-based research team! We’re trying to mock something up on RepGrid for a unit that our teachers are teaching on microorganisms and microscope use in Grade 7 science classrooms. Still working on what kind of conceptual change we can measure in terms of eliciting students’ knowledge. Our work on the repertory grid will inform the OLM work. It is all coming together nicely!

Still, being an academic, especially an academic parent in a foreign country, is not easy. I’ve been buried under deadlines of various sorts, but managed in the last week or two to…

• send off a co-authored proceeding for the PALE workshop at UMAP to press
• finish edits on a co-authored manuscript for journal submission
• help my MA student hand in the final draft of his thesis project for defense
• collect interview data from Danish teachers participating in the NEXT-TELL project
• run a design workshop introducing repertory grids with the said teachers
• start drafting up the skeleton of the design paper that I’m writing with some colleagues at CBS
• upload my CSCL 2011 Early Career Workshop proposal to the Moodle site to introduce myself to the other participants
• get my Toronto home cleaned, extra keys cut, etc. in preparation for renters (a nice academic family) that we found through Sabbatical Homes
• etc. etc. etc.

Although some aspects of research seem much easier after defending my dissertation, the amount of work and responsibilities have increased dramatically in my postdoc. I enjoy it, though. I’m really engaged with the work that I do, particularly on design in design-based research and the repertory grid technique that we are using to elicit conceptual understandings from teachers about formative assessment and ICT use. More on that in a future post.

Back home in Canada, this was a no-brainer because I had a washer and dryer at home and I could run it at any time of the day while I worked on other things. Going to a laundromat changes things. On the bright side, you can do multiple loads at once on large capacity machines and get it all done quickly; on the grim side, you may be stuck lugging large loads of laundry while pushing a stroller, balancing an umbrella, and entertaining a hungry toddler!

Here’s what I learned from going to the nearest laundromat from Villa Louis Pasteur, Lav Club at 57 Rue Claude Bernard:
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Even if you’re fluent in French, it might be hard to figure out the drill from the instructions:

So here are my instructions. First, load your laundry into a washing machine. The washing machines come in two sizes (6kg or 13kg). I usually used the smaller capacity ones. Close the door.

(Note: I usually sorted at VLP so that I could do a load of darks and another of whites/light colours. I used a big laundry bag brought from Canada and slung it on my stroller. I saw my neighbours using their suitcases with wheels). Select the type of wash you are doing. The control panel offers you lots of choices. The numbers you see are temperatures: 60 and up would be hot, 40 is warm, 30 is cool. You can also choose settings for delicate wash (silk, wool) and permanent press.

Put in your detergent in the main compartment, “II” (bottom left?). I usually stuck to a basic wash using liquid detergent. I bought Ariel, a popular brand similar to Tide, at Monoprix. You can buy Ariel tablets and Snuggle fabric softener from a vending machine at the Lav Club. If using liquid fabric softener or starch, put it in the “flower” symbol section. If doing a prewash, use the “I” compartment.

Now, walk over to the control panel. Punch in your washing machine number. The cost per wash, if I recall correctly, was 4 euros. Use the correct denomination of coins. The panel is supposed to take bills, but I could never get this to work! Sometimes, you will find a very helpful local who will help break down your bill, but a better bet is to go to the convenience store just down the street and buy a yoghurt or candy or something. No one will steal your laundry as you’re doing this. Be sure to have extra change. I’ve entered in the correct amount, only to have the machine deny having received payment. You will know that it worked when the washing machine starts to churn.

This is where it turns into a guessing game for me. Normally, North American washing machines take 26 to 30 minutes to wash a load of laundry. In France, there are exceptionalities. My husband didn’t believe me until he witnessed it for himself! It is a bit like a random number generator. Ignore the electronic display. This changes erratically. It might be temperature, not time remaining. It took about 45 minutes or more to do a load of laundry. This gave me enough time to head over to the library on Rue Mouffetard to entertain my daughter in the children’s section in the basement (very nice librarians and very nice French children who will ask you whose mother you are). You could also pick up some groceries at Franprix on Rue Mouffetard by the library while you’re at it.

Once the wash is done, you can use one of the two plastic laundry baskets at Lav Club to transfer your load to a dryer. Put the clothes in and close the door. Punch in the appropriate number at the panel. One round of drying costs 1 euro. You don’t have any control over the settings, and the heat is, well, very hot. So don’t put in woolly bits or anything that might shrink (e.g., designer jeans that are already a bit snug). Technically, you can add more time while the dryer is moving, but this wasn’t reliable for me. Also, you should be able to open the door and take a few things out and restart the dryer, but this didn’t work for me, either!

My favourite part about doing laundry at the Lav Club were the very polite construction workers, “Bonjour Madame!” who were doing some reno to the building while I was there. They always greeted me and opened the door for me so I could push the stroller through, and didn’t mind my daughter staring at them while they worked.

On the way back to Villa Louis Pasteur, you may encounter a beggar on the corner by the Post Office. I always hated passing by there because he kept saying, “Madame, j’ai faim!” Terrible! I wish I could have given him something, but I was always out of coins. Sigh!

Chris Paton is a teacher of English and Danish in Qaanaaq, Greenland. His Master’s research examines how Greenlanders can use social media such as Facebook to share traditional Inuit knowledge. Recently, Chris was interviewed by the Greenlandic national newspaper AG. You can download the article Facebook can preserve Inuit culture. It is in Greenlandic, but Google Translate gives you the gist.

Chris is currently collecting survey data on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FBmisissuineq2011

It’s been quite a successful way to collect survey data. Chris will run the survey until the end of the month. I’m looking forward to his findings on how Greenlanders are using Facebook to share knowledge, what kind of knowledge they are sharing (tacit knowledge, traditional knowledge, Inuit knowledge, local knowledge), and how this might help in preservation of the Greenlandic language.

As a supervisor, I’m trying to help Chris learn academic culture. He’s at a distance from campus–quite a ways–and isolated from experiences available to traditional, full-time graduate students on campus. From my work on the GRAIL project at OISE/UT (see for e.g., Fujita & Freeman, 2006), I know that there are particular challenges for part-time graduate students who study at a distance like Chris. So, we try to meet weekly via Skype, but it’s been hard to maintain a regular schedule due to our busy schedules involving lots of travel.

One of my goals was to make sure Chris was able to participate in the academic research community by presenting and disseminating his work outside of the program context. Fortunately,
Chris has already connected with some researchers at ELOKA at University of Colorado at Boulder and is in the process of submitting a abstract for a workshop there. I offered to help him craft the abstract, but soon realized that I had learned to write abstracts a very long time ago and have internalized how to write them. So, I consulted resources on what abstracts should include and how one might go about writing one. I’ve added the resources I thought were helpful on a new page on my blog called Supervision. I’ll continually add new resources that might be useful for other graduate students there.

The 2011 Nordic Skiing World Championshipswas held in Oslo, so there were a lot of winter festivities in which to take part the first night we were there. There were Munch The Screamice sculptures, an outdoor skating rink, traditional Norwegian food stands, tents of hand-crafted goods (Norwegian colourwork knits), lots of flag waving, Helly Hansen outdoor gear, etc. on the main strip just by our hotel. Pretty neat!

The meeting itself was a great opportunity to meet colleagues in the Nordforsk network and the Lecturers, including Gerhard Fischer , whose talk I missed at the STELLAR Alpine Rendez-Vous 2009 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. At the time, Tatiana was 4 months old and though she was very cooperative and slept through much of the Pinpointing Pivotal Moments workshop, she fussed too much for me to take her into Gerhard’s keynote. It was a pleasure to be able to spend time talking to Gerhard about our work on the NEXT-TELL project and to get some advice on our academic trajectory. Gerhard’s ideas on cultures of participation really resonates with me because I think it’s really important to help teachers build the capacity to contribute to designs of CSCL tools. It’s a transition I’d like to scaffold, to support teachers to become designers of CSCL tools rather than to be consumers of these tools.

In terms of scaffolding, I’ve often mulled over whether teachers should fade the scaffold or not with regard to my thesis research on KF scaffolds. I remember talking about this as far back as at a symposium at SITE 2005 in Phoenix in which Niki Davis was the discussant, and the other presenters were Therese Laferriere, Mary Lamon, and Clare Brett. Gerhard’s conceptualizations favour not fading the scaffold and embraces distributed intelligence (Pea, 1993). Very interesting, because it really changes the way we think about instructional scaffolding.

I’ve had this post as a draft for quite a while. It’s been a few months since we left Paris, but I wanted to post a little primer to make day-to-day life at Villa Louis Pasteur, the faculty housing that was our home away from home in Paris, a little bit easier and a whole lot more enjoyable for other academics who will stay there in the future.

Most guests at Villa Louis Pasteur, we gathered, stay only for a few days. We were there for two months. Thus, we had time to become regulars at our favourite haunts. One of our favourite bakeries is the Artisan Boulanger, just down the street and around the corner, at 243 Rue Saint-Jacques:

His sourdough baguettes are out of this world, as are his croissants and brioches. He also makes killer fruit tarts and tarts salés for lunch. The bad news is that the boulangerie is closed on the weekends.

If caught without fresh baguette on a Saturday morning, you are generally out of luck. Later, perhaps around 1pm, you might try Chants de Ble on Rue Mouffetard (at Rue de la Abalete; ignore the signage for “Les Panetons” on this older photo from Google Maps):

For foodies, Rue Mouffetard is a sensory delight. Fromagers sell cheese that artisans make; fromageries sell their own creations. A fine culinary distinction, we learned. There are regional cheese specialties to discover (e.g. Mont D’Or from Franche-Comte) that cost a fortune back in Toronto, but are completely reasonable here. The wine is also much cheaper here than in Canada, and quite acceptable, even if you have limited selection to choose from at a mini mart or discount supermarket. Of course, you could visit a wine store or check out the wine specials at Monoprix (the French version of Target, but with a lovely food section). Be sure to get a Monoprix card to feel like a native. There is a certain satisfaction to be able to respond, “Oui,” when the cashier asks you for your membership card.

On Sundays, and on weekend evenings, our favourite boulangerie was L’Epi D’Or, on the corner opposite Val du Grace:

The baguettes are baked throughout the day. There is nothing quite like breaking into a warm, freshly-baked baguette on your way home. Tatiana garnered much attention for noshing on a piece of baguette in her stroller.

Eating baguettes or other baked goods on the way home is quite common in France, but forget about getting takeout coffee! Servers will give you a quizzical look if you ask for coffee to go. It is simply not done in Paris. You must sit at a cafe and savour your espresso in a china cup and saucer. None of this rushing about with a large double-double from Tim’s or a Grande latte from Starbucks in a paper cup with a leaky lid.

We ate a lot of baguette and cheese with far too much red wine. There are lots of attractions nearby, most within easy walking distance. The famous museums are, of course, the Louvre and perhaps Musee d’Orsay. But I would recommend checking out Musee nationale du Moyen Age for the incredible medieval tapestries and Centre Pompidou for the works by who’s who in modern art. One advantage of traveling with an infant is that you are invited to bypass the queue. The museums are surprisingly kid friendly and accessible. Tatiana especially loved the sculptures and stained glass, and we had fun spotting her favourite animals in paintings (e.g., dog, duck, and horse).

On a more practical note, after visiting famous attractions and cultural icons, we often shopped for groceries. This was a daily chore for me because we only had a bar fridge in which to store perishables, two stove-top burners (with no numbers or other indicators), a sink, one saucepan, one frying pan, and one dutch oven in our kitchenette. The closest supermarkets are the two Franprix locations across the street from each other on Saint Michel and Ed on Rue Pierre Nicole:

Unfortunately, we did not realize that the two Franprix locations were very different. The one on the west side, closer to the Jardin du Luxembourg, has a higher-end feel to it, with wider aisles (important when you have a toddler in an umbrella stroller who likes to touch everything), nicer displays and better wine selection. The east side one has things like drano and other household necessities, however! Ed is quite the supermarket experience. Loblaws shoppers beware! Ed is more like a no frills No Frills or bare bones Food Basics. Even the locals, the Parisiennes, are startled by the surly cashiers who bark at you for not weighing your own vegetables and affixing the appropriate price tag sticker on your produce. One cashier, a kindly sort, will continue to yell out the cost of the purchase as you dig through your coins to find the correct Euro coin. Eventually, exasperated, she will switch to English. Alas, the problem is not in comprehending the amount of the bill, but rather figuring out the value of the coins! She will pick out the right coins for you if you surrender your wallet to her. A kindly soul!

I will save the adventures of the French laundrette for another post. Having survived the French laundry experience has prepared me to figure out the Danish one, by the way..

Stian Håklev :

It was a great conference, and I would have loved to see you there, but Vatrapu did an excellent job at presenting (he should get most valued presenter for all the different talks he had to do). It will be interesting to see if they make it an annual event, and where it might be next year. Would also love to hear some of your reflections on the papers that were presented – it’s an interesting mix, both of research and people. Some have been working with similar stuff for 10-20 years, others are quite new to the game. Also very different crowd that does learning analytics for big for-profit universities to prevent people from dropping out, and for example the CSCL group.

Thanks Stian for prompting me to reflect on papers at the LAK’11 conference. I’ve been mulling over some issues around the kind of analytics that people have presented as “learning analytics.” I wonder if it would help to distinguish between “learning analytics” and “academic analytics.”

One definition for learning analytics emerged from the LAK11 open course:

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.

Earlier, George Siemens, the organizer of the LAK11 conference, suggested,

Learning analytics is the use of intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections, and to predict and advise on learning.

Both of these definitions focus on collecting and analyzing big data to understand what is happening among learners and intervening, presumably to enhance their learning. A number of LAK’11 papers seemed to be working under this definition, for example, papers by Dan Suthers & Devan Rosen, Simon Buckingham Shum & Anna De Liddo, and Erik Duval and colleagues.

Other presenters, for example Xavier Ochoa, one of the keynote speakers, emphasize a business intelligence approach.

As a learning scientist working at a business school, I have to acknowledge the economic importance of this perspective. Big, for-profit universities have a vested interest in retaining students because it costs them a lot of money to recruit students to replace those who withdraw without completing a degree. In the Danish context, for instance, students receive a “free” higher education and even receive a stipend for going to university, but the university will not receive payment from the State unless they graduate. For these purposes, however, I’d like to use a different term, academic analytics, rather than learning analytics. Academic analytics focuses more on the administrative or the business side of academia rather than the learning part.

Wikipedia defines academic analytics as the

term for business intelligence used in an academic setting. There is an increasing distinction made between academic analytics and traditional BI because of the unique type of information that university administrators require for decision making.

To date, EDUCAUSE offers 42 resources on academic analytics. Campbell and Oblinger (2007) highlight what IT and institutional leaders need to understand about academic analytics and how they can act on that information. Their definition of student success (retention and graduation) is a very different one than the one that I hold dear, which aspires to help learners develop deep conceptual understanding in different domains and 21st century skills like collaboration and problem solving.

I think it is crucial to identify learners at risk and offer support. Support is typically phone calls in the academic analytics literature; support is more often providing scaffolding through research-based instructional interventions in the learning sciences. For learning analytics, we know that education opens up opportunities for people, especially people who come from marginalized groups. So being able to see learners who are doing well and not so well in a visualization is useful. For example, Buckingham Shum showed a viz for learning analytics in English schools, a chart showing proportions of students achieving different levels of success in math. It would also be helpful to be able to predict what kind of learners would succeed or struggle when and how. My current project research aimes to take the visualization further, since formative assessment for learning in open learner models would pinpoint misconceptions in a particular domain and at what stage in the progression. As a design-based researcher, knowing when and how to intervene to improve learning by adjusting designs of learning environments or pedagogical methods is key.

On the other hand, I’m a bit wary about the uses of academic analytics. Summary statistics result in a great reduction of data. Closer examination of the data through complementary, and usually more time consuming and labour intensive qualitative analyses are necessary to understand learner interactions to foster learning. In terms of retention and graduation, my frame of reference is coloured by my previous project work on GRAIL, where we looked at how to support graduate students studying at a distance from campus with social and technological tools. We referenced work by scholars like Chris Golde, who researches ways to reshape and improve doctoral education. Very few higher education learners make it to graduate school. Fewer still complete their dissertation. After graduation, only some of us get hired into tenure-stream positions, and others quit to join industry. Obviously, there is an appeal to market big data analytics. So the question in my mind is, who benefits from academic analytics? For-profit universities would like to attract and retain the top students because this makes the most financial sense to them. What happens if institutions can predict who will be at risk and who will be resistant to intervention? I’d like to believe in the altruistic uses of academic analytics, but there is that domineering ideology of capitalism in the late postmodern era. Maybe I’m being too cynical!