The National Forum for Teaching and Learning's project on Learning Analytics runs from September 2016 to June 2017. The goals of this project are to establish a national community of practitioners, researchers and interested parties, to raise awareness of the potential of Learning Analytics to enhance the student experience and to build institutions' capacities to develop effective and successful analytics strategies.
It became apparent early in the project that, although there is a sectoral interest in this disruptive, evidence-based methodology, there is a paucity of resources available to guide institutions and individuals through the many ethical, technical and operational challenges that must be overcome. To address this shortfall, we set about compiling ORLA (Online Resource for Learning Analytics), an open-access online library of resources designed to assist institutions and individuals to develop best-practice analytics approaches.
ORLA has been driven and informed by four working groups comprising over sixty lecturers, researchers, students, IT & Library professionals, student advisors and teaching & learning experts from across the country and sector that have looked, respectively, at the issues of:
- Ethics, Policy & Law
- IT & Infrastructure
- Data Aggregation & Modelling
- Teaching, Learning & Effective Interventions
When ORLA is available from summer 2017, it will include resources covering topics such as Data Protection, policy development, introductions to data analysis, case studies of Irish evidence-based learning design, potential future research, useful data sources, data quality, relevant VLE features and use, effective intervention planning, selecting the right platform etc as well as guides to Learning Analytics for institutions, staff and students.
This presentation will provide further insight into the fundamentals of Learning Analytics, the National Forum's analytics project, the drivers behind ORLA and an overview of some of the resources which will be made available.
Topics: Global challenges in Higher & Further Education , Topics: Learning analytics: research and practice
