Many strong claims have been made for Learning Analytics and the potential which it has to transform the education system, which deserve to be treated with caution, [...]]]> CETIS Analytics Series Vol 1, No 10. Analytics for Teaching Practice (pdf)
CETIS Analytics Series Vol 1, No 10. Analytics for Teaching Practice (MS Word .docx)

Many strong claims have been made for Learning Analytics and the potential which it has to transform the education system, which deserve to be treated with caution, particularly as they regard teaching practice.

The introduction of these techniques cannot be understood in isolation from the methods of educational management as they have grown up over the past two centuries. These methods are conditioned by the fact that educational managers are limited in their capability to monitor and act upon the range of states which are taken up by teachers and learners in their learning activities. Strategies for simplification have been developed which classify the range of knowledge as a number of subjects, reduce the subjects to courses, and assign students to cohorts which carry out the same activities. Teachers, meanwhile, deal as best they can with the full variety of learners’ needs in their practice. Over the years, an accommodation has developed between regulatory authorities, management and teaching professionals: educational managers indicate the goals which teachers and learners should work towards, provide a framework for them to act within, and ensure that the results of their activity meet some minimum standards. The rest is left up to the professional skills of teachers and the ethical integrity of both teachers and learners.

This accommodation has been eroded by the efforts of successive governments to increase their control over the education received by both school and higher education students. Learning Analytics radically reduces the effort involved in gathering information on the way in which lecturers deliver the curriculum, and also to automate the work of analysing this information. An alliance of these two trends has the potential to constrain teaching practice, and therefore it is necessary to take a systemic view when assessing the impact of analytics on teaching practice.

Three types of analytics intervention are discussed, in terms of their impact on practice.

• efficiency in the wider functioning of the institution, which has few implications for teaching practice,
• enhanced regulation of the teaching and learning environment, which has potentially negative impact on teaching practice,
• methods and tools intended to help lecturers carry out their tasks more effectively, which have the potential to be a useful tool in teaching practice.

It is concluded that Learning Analytics should not be seen as a short cut to providing teaching professionals with universal advice on ‘what works’, and that its use to increase the accountability of teachers to management may have unintended negative consequences. Rather, the most promising area for enhancing teaching practice is the creation of applications which help teachers identify which of the many interventions open to them are most worthy of their attention, as part of an on-going collaborative inquiry into effective practice.

Summary: Position papers and discussion explored the relationship between relatively informal and formal specs/standards activities and how a more effective system might work.

No longer current.

A CETIS Briefing Paper on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which offers a simple technical option for catalogue and repository services to make their metadata available to other services.

This paper aims to inform those with an interest in repositories in general, and those with an interest in assessment item banks, about the similarities and differences between these two technologies, [...]]]> Link: Assessment item banks and repositories (html).
Link: Assessment item banks and repositories (doc).
Link: Assessment item banks and repositories (pdf).

This paper aims to inform those with an interest in repositories in general, and those with an interest in assessment item banks, about the similarities and differences between these two technologies, in order to enhance the potential for future interoperability. Specifically, it asks the question: to what extent may an assessment item bank be considered as a kind of repository, and following from this, to what extent can interoperability and minimisation of effort and resource be achieved in a manner beneficial to the related communities of interest around these technologies?

This paper discusses assessment item bank that can be used by academics to share assessment content within or across a range of institutions. The concept is not new, [...]]]> Link: Assessment item banks: an academic perspective (html).
Link: Assessment item banks: an academic perspective (doc).
Link: Assessment item banks: an academic perspective (pdf).

This paper discusses assessment item bank that can be used by academics to share assessment content within or across a range of institutions. The concept is not new, but technical developments now render such a resource far more attractive and realisable than ever before. The paper considers the rationale of electronic assessment systems and assessment item banks used in HE. Some aspects of interoperability technology, including IMS QTI (the specification for Question and Test Interoperability), are described and discussed. The main assessment systems being used in HE are described with some details of the question types supported and how well they interoperate with other systems.

A CETIS Briefing Paper on the ADL Shareable Content Object Reference Model. Shareable content objects (SCOs) are individual, electronic units of learning that may be combined to create a course of study.

No longer current

A briefing on IMS Simple Sequencing (IMS SS) which is a specification used to describe paths through a collection of learning activities.

No longer current