Tony Bates is helpfully writing summaries of areticles in the most recent issue of Distance Education. The closed-access subscription-based journal is running a special issue on learning analytics. The first article covered, 'Learning analytics for learning design in online distance education', reaches an interesting conclusion: "even with a large base of learning designs (55) and learners (nearly 50,000) the study failed to find any correlations that would explain student success or failure related to different learning designs." This runs contrary to previous work on the topic. And Bates has questions about the range of learning designs used in the study; "It seems that it is as difficult at the OU as elsewhere to get away from the traditional focus on content delivery assimilation." I'm not sure whether I'm ready to call learning design a 'myth' yet, but it could be that the writing is on the wall.
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