News Story

Learning Analytics Summer Institute – Stanford and Global Online

Simon Buckingham Shum, Monday 10 Jun 2013

In July 1-5, the world’s leading Learning Analytics people gather at Stanford University, connected to a global network, for a field-defining week. I’ve been on the planning team for a year — here’s how to join in…

Learning Analytics as both a research topic and emerging marketplace has recently garnered the attention of faculty, educational researchers and administrators, policy makers, data scientists and learning technology entrepreneurs. Unprecedented quantity of, and access to, learner-generated data has opened up new opportunities, for instance, for researchers to better understand how learners learn, for educators to assess the impact of teaching activities and interventions, and for learners to receive personalized, real-time, automated support for their learning advancements.

A critical window of opportunity is opening as we stand on the threshold of what may be a new discipline with disruptive potential for educational research and practice. Bringing the right mix of people together for an intensive ‘summer camp’ could serve as an intellectual and social springboard to accelerate the maturation of the discipline — as was the case for other young disciplines, such as cognitive neuroscience.

The Learning Analytics Summer Institute at Stanford (LASI-Stanford) is a strategic five-day event, July 1-5, 2013, co-organized by SoLAR and Stanford University. The International Educational Data Mining Society is also assisting with event organization. In parallel, a global network of LASI-Locals will run their own institutes. The objective is that participants will leave better equipped to actively engage in advancing the LA field through their teaching and research activities. Specifically, LASI has two goals:

Build the field of Learning Analytics through cross disciplinary interactions, identification of research and teaching needs, advancement of LA methods, and connecting isolated researchers.

Develop the skills and knowledge of doctoral students and academics, equipping them to engage actively in LA research and teaching.

The OU is heavily engaged with LASI-Stanford and LASI-Locals. I am on the planning group for LASI-Stanford, am coordinating the LASI-Locals network, and four OU staff are contributing to this massively over-subscribed week, including KMi’s Simon Knight, IET’s Rebecca Ferguson and Doug Clow, and MCT’s Tony Hirst. I am chairing the Dispositional Analytics workshop.

YOU can tune into Stanford webcasts, and join in the discussions, via the LASI-Local page.

Watch KMi news for an update on how this historic week unfolds around the globe…