Talks | UBC Learning Analytics

Upcoming Talks

Wednesday March 20, 2024: Kyoto Japan

Members of the Learning Technology Hub Learning Analytics team will be presenting Hackathons for Awareness and Community Engagement in Learning Analytics at LAK2024.

Details: Challenges of institutional adoption of learning analytics include lack of student engagement, little transparency, and few opportunities for feedback. In this report, we reflect on one element of our institution’s approach to these challenges: regular engagement of students, practitioners, and institutional leadership through Learning Analytics Hackathons. The history and evolution of these hackathons mirror the advancement of learning analytics at the University of British Columbia: they started as community-driven events but have gained institutional support and attention as our data infrastructure and learning analytics culture matures. At the time of writing, the authors are planning the 9th Learning Analytics Hackathon. In this report, we share our approach, lessons learned, and discuss opportunities for continued student engagement in learning analytics at our institution.

Past Talks

Learning Events and Learning Record Stores: A Practical Introduction

Jeff Longland

April 6, 2023

Much has been written about how data and analytics can unearth new questions and innovative solutions. Data-driven decision models are heralded as part of digital transformation initiatives. Clickstream data can be mined for valuable insights! But what does it *actually* mean for teaching and learning?

This session won’t discuss the hype surrounding data and analytics initiatives. It won’t be academic or research-driven. What it will provide is a practical introduction to learning event standards (eg. xAPI, Caliper), learning record stores, and the work underway at UBC to build data infrastructure for learning data. We’ll cover:

Who needs learning events? Who is a learning event about?
What is a learning event?
When does a learning event occur?
Where do learning events occur and where do they go?
Why?

It’s a whirlwind journey through the challenges and opportunities where the learning analytics rubber meets the road. We’ll cover how a learning tool is instrumented to emit events and its journey to a storage location where it can be used to support evidence-informed teaching and learning.

Student Flows – Video

Craig Thompson & Annay Slabikowska

November 5, 2021

A group of analysts at UBC have been collaborating to answer common questions about student progression through courses and programs. In this session we will share lessons learned from our work, as well as tips for success for those interested in undertaking similar initiatives.

Instrumenting for Learning Events at UBC

Jeff Longland

November 5, 2021

An introduction to learning events, learning record stores and the work underway at UBC to build a data system for learning events. We’ll look at how we’ve instrumented learning tools to emit structured events, how events are ingested and stored, then explore examples of how events can be used in instructor and student dashboards.

In-house Video Analytics: Taking advantage of available log data to create contextually-relevant learning analytics dashboards

Alison Myers, Marko Prodanovic, and Sunah Cho

November 5, 2021

Learning Analytics can provide valuable insights to instructors regarding their teaching, however, analytics from vendor tools are often isolated datasets, which do not give the entire picture. We explored how to combine log data about video viewing activity with LMS data about course structure in order to provide our instructors with analytics that included not only student video watching behaviours (from the log data), but also contextual information about their course (from the LMS data). As the field of learning analytics has matured, we often see “scaled” solutions that aim to provide data or insights to an entire institution. However, the goal of “scale” can overshadow the design decisions made by individual instructors, creating analytics that are not relevant or detailed enough for decision making. Our collaboration between the analytics team and a learning designer allowed the focused development of a learning analytics dashboard that is contextually relevant and meaningful for our instructors so that they can use the information to make design decisions to improve their teaching and the student experience.

Putting Data to Work at the University of Michigan – Video

Timothy McKay, University of Michigan

June 20, 2019

On June 20, Timothy A. McKay visited UBC to share his experiences using learning analytics to explore equity and improve learning at the University of Michigan. More than 60 graduate students, faculty, and staff attended McKay’s keynote, which kicked off UBC’s Afternoon of Learning Analytics event.

Learning Analytics at UBC: Establishment of Institutional End-to-End Learning Analytics Capability

Jeff Longland and Craig Thompson

May 2, 2019

Learning analytics (LA) is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. UBC is in the middle of a learning analytics innovation project to build an institutional culture, support capacity, policy framework and technical infrastructure to use LA to drive continuous improvement in the learning environment.