Is It Possible to Develop a Parsimonious Approach to Design-aware Learning Analytics?

The talk will outline an approach to learning design that begins by asking ‘what does it take to learn X’, where X is the intended cognitive learning outcome. The Learning Designer online design tool for teachers provides a structure for the teacher to think through the teaching-learning activities students need to do if they are to achieve the stated outcomes. The tool makes explicit the nature of the teacher’s pedagogic design, which can be tested via a rubric for evaluating a particular learning design. Respecting the key idea of parsimony in how we characterise the world around us it defines six learning types for the teacher-designer to select from, one of which is ‘learning through production’. This would cover the familiar forms of formative and summative assessment, but can also be represented in the way a student interacts with the digital tasks and resources on offer. From this planned online interaction we can determine the nature of the learning analytics we need if we are to understand the process of learning, and the process of not learning, and thereby generate learner support. The talk will offer examples of how learning designs from the literature can be interpreted in the Learning Designer tool to see the extent to which this can help to generate forms of ‘design-aware learning analytics’.