research

Revisiting our 'Ethical Obligation of Knowing' with Learning Analytics

Monday, Jun 1, 2020 by John Whitmer, EdD learning analytics, ethics, research,

The Ethical Obligation of Knowing In the early days of our field, John P. Campbell wrote in his doctoral dissertation about an institution’s “ethical obligation of knowing” (2007) the insights that could come from predictive analytics about our students. If organizations had insights that uncovered the capability to analyze the data that they were storing and that they were obligated, ethically if not legally, to do something about it. Jumping forward a decade, Paul Prinsloo and Sharon Slade, writing from far-away points on the globe, have argued that this issue is “the elephant in the learning analytics room” (2019).

Not Normal!

Tuesday, Jan 14, 2020 by Aleksander Dietrichson, PhD R, methods, non-parametric, research,

In spite of both theorecital and empirical evidence to the contrary, it is often assumed that grades are or should be normally distributed. This has important implications for how we understand and analyze these data-points within learning analytics. In this blog posts I will take a look at some of the theoretical assumtions surrounding the normal distribution and how it applies to grading data, and offer some proposals on what to do when these assumptions are not met.

research

Revisiting our 'Ethical Obligation of Knowing' with Learning Analytics

Not Normal!

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