News Story

DfE consults KMi on Educational Big Data/Analytics

Simon Buckingham Shum, Friday 06 June 2014 | Annotate

The Dept. for Education Educational Technology Action Group (ETAG), was set up in February 2014 by three Ministers: Michael Gove, Matthew Hancock and David Willetts. In response to the online consultation, Simon Knight and I have contributed to the ETAG2a cluster focused on: Students with sight and control of their own complex learning "big" data.

Read our contribution on key principles which should shape the analytics landscape, and track the #etag2a twitter stream...

We meet at the Dept. for Education next week with the expert working group with representation from schools, higher education, business and government, where we will discuss the issues raised in our submission, and share examples of different kinds of learning analytics and what is currently possible.

KMi's analytics research, conducted in collaboration with OU business units and other researchers, is at the forefront of computational techniques for making sense of the rich datasets that learners now create as digital traces. For examples see:

• Predictive analytics on student success
• Discourse analytics on the quality of academic writing, online textchat, and collective intelligence
• Dispositional analytics on learners' habits of mind
• Community health analytics on the dynamics of online groups
• Open data/educational resource analytics using linked data
• Epistemic cognition analytics through collaborative search
• How analytics shape education, through epistemology, pedagogy and assessment regimes

A report will be compiled over the summer, which will make a number of recommendations for ministers to consider.