7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 10:00am The Learning Analytics Landscape: Surveying Where we are and Where we are Going
Speaker: Joshua Baron, Senior Academic Technology Officer, Marist College

Learning Analytics has exploded onto the higher education landscape with promises of addressing some of the major challenges facing today's institutional leaders, such as course completion, content mastery and college retention rates. At the same time, it has raised major technical, ethical and policy questions which by-in-large remain unanswered. Josh Baron, Senior Academic Technology Officer at Marist College, and Co-PI on the NGLC Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI), will provide a broad overview of today's learning analytics landscape while sharing outcomes from the work he is leading at Marist to develop an open-source analytics solution and some of the related research Marist's faculty have been conducting on the effective of different intervention strategies. Bring your questions as well as your concerns and ideas as there will be plenty of chances to share and interact.

10:00am - 10:50am Fostering More Personalized and Adaptable Learning Experiences Through Student-centered Learning Analytics
Speaker: Johann Ari Larusson, Ph.D., Senior Recommendation Engineer, Alleyoop - Pearson Education

Much of the work in Learning Analytics has focused on building and using methods and tools for analyzing student learning “after the fact”. It goes without saying, that this type of work provides a foundation upon which courses and technology can be (re-)designed so as to better support students in their future learning endeavors. Unfortunately, this does not address the issue of students potentially graduating between semesters with gaps in their "prerequisite" knowledge due to missed opportunities of enhancing teaching and learning for students struggling to grasp course concepts.

This talk discusses the benefits of building tools that focus on evaluating the learning processes of individual students, as they naturally emerge, “live” during a semester. These types of tools can provide a student with valuable feedback, and customized support, to help him or her advance their own learning. Also, these tools can enable an instructor to intervene, immediately when needed, and help a struggling student better understand troubling concepts. This talk will discuss the differences in both approaches, provide a conceptual framework for the latter, and showcase some examples where analytics are being applied at the student level.

10:50am – 11:00am Break

11:00am – 11:50am Correlating Library Services and Academic Success: A Project with Potential?
Speaker: Heather Woods, Director, Research & Instructional Support, Library & Technology Services, Wellesley College

As a part of last year's NMC/NERLA Learning Analytics Workshop a small group of LTS staff members at Wellesley brainstormed how we might think about the effect of library support on student success. This presentation will cover the LA project idea we developed as well as some of the challenges we anticipated running into along the way.

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm – 1:50pm Yes We Khan!: Taking a closer look at the learning analytics in Khan Academy and in foreign language learning and research tools
Speaker: Scott Payne, Director of Academic Technology Services, Amherst College

The ability to track and analyze learner performance data is an important resource for teachers, students, and educational researchers. This presentation will have two parts. The first will focus on the learning analytic reports available in the Khan Academy dashboard and discuss how these reports can provide valuable feedback to both teachers and students. In the second part of this talk, I will show and discuss some analytic tools currently under development as a part of an effort to create a system for delivering language and culture training. These analytic tools are being designed to provide information on individual learner trajectories and support inter-learner and individual-to-group comparisons.

2:00pm – 2:50pm Visualizing Interaction: Learning Analytics to Improve Online Discourse
Speakers:
Sarah Krongard, Instructional Designer, Lesley University
John McCormick, Senior Instructional Designer, Lesley University

We performed an exploratory pilot project to determine the potential of using a learning analytics tool, Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP), to illustrate and better understand student interaction in online discussion boards. The visuals generated by SNAPP depict aspects of online learning interactions and relationships that are difficult to discern using display tools currently available within learning management systems. To assist instructors in interpreting interaction patterns occurring in their discussions, we developed a visual taxonomy of interaction patterns. We then discussed with instructors potential interventions to improve the learning designs of their online discussions. Our main goal is to use SNAPP and other future such tools as part of professional development activities to improve the design and facilitation of online collaboration.

3:00pm End