Recognize rigor in learning analytics is multi-faceted

First of all, I’d like to thank our JLA editors-in-chief and SoLAR for organizing this webinar, and more events to come on the topic of rigor. As a community, learning analytics has grown substantially and to a great extent matured since it emerged around 10 years ago. Thanks to tremendous work by colleagues, we have an annual conference, a professional society, an established journal, and probably even more importantly, significant interest in our field from society.

Using Web Annotation for Web Annotation Research

In response to a special call for papers from Information and Learning Sciences, a team of us rallied and wrote a review article about Using Social Annotation in Online Classes ( see preprint). It was an interesting challenge given the short timeframe. But we eventually pulled this off as a team thanks to Xinran Zhu’s strong leadership and everyone’s dedication to this work. In this blog post, I won’t talk about what we wrote.

A Map of Collaboration Analytics

In a chapter to be included in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Learning Analytis, Dr. Stephanie Teasley and I tried to write about Collaboration Analytics in a way that integrate ideas from CSCL, CSCW, learning sciences, and learning analytics. Below is a draft abstract of the chapter. In this post, I am sharing a key message from this chapter – a map of collaboration analytics – and invite you to provide me feedback and suggestions.

My Statement of Graduate Advising

Following advice from a fantastic leadership coach from my university, I drafted a statement of advising philosophy in the past summer (yes the summer has already passed in MN). Here it is! Please feel free to leave suggestions via Hypothesis annotations. The other project that I haven’t accomplished this summer is to create a Résumé of Failures. Hope I don’t need to wait for the next summer because that will be a big failure :).

A Call for Third-Order Change in Learning Analytics

[Disclaimer: It’s summer time, meaning time for some bold statements.] “Any educational intervention, for the obvious, common-sense reasons mentioned above, can do harm… ignoring side effects is one of the main reasons for the perpetual wars and pendulum swings in education.” — Yong Zhao (2018) Education often turns to other disciplines for inspirations. In medicine, precision medicine “takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person” when treating diseases.