Learning analytics for the social media age

Abstract

In just a short period of time, social media have altered many aspects of our daily lives, from how we form and maintain social relationships to how we discover, access and share information online. Now social media are also beginning to affect how we teach and learn in this increasingly interconnected and information-rich world. The panelists will discuss their ongoing work that seeks to understand the affordances and potential roles of social media in learning, as well as to determine and provide methods that can help researchers and educators evaluate the use of social media for teaching and learning based on automated analyses of social media texts and networks. The panel will focus on the first phase of this five-year research initiative "Learning

Crowdsourcing the curriculum: Redefining e-learning practices through peer-generated approaches

“…However, it should be noted that data collection is not always a simple task, and is highly dependent on the environments and tools that learners are using, and the types of data that result. For example, the data resulting from cMOOC activity is much more difficult to collect, clean, and process than that of its xMOOC counterpart, as cMOOCs often involve numerous social networks and platforms (Gruzd, Haythornthwaite, Paulin, Absar, & Huggett, 2014). This makes improvements via crowdsourcing and algorithmic analyses much more difficult for cMOOCs.…”

Linking Online Identities and Content in Connectivist MOOCs across Multiple Social Media Platforms

“…A perusal of recent EDUCAUSE Studies of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology [6,22] indicates that social media are both being formally integrated into institutional academic learning experiences, and are also being used informally by students to supplement their learning experiences. This allows students to reach wider social networks via social media while simultaneously "meeting the student population where it lives: i.e., online, in social networking sites and in the microforms of communication adopted in Twitter" and other popular online platforms [10].…”

“…For those researching social media use, media multiplexity offers complex challenges to overcome. For example, connecting a user's identity across multiple social media is a difficult challenge for researchers to address, but one that must be attended in order to gain a deeper understanding of learning processes that are occurring within and surrounding social media use [10]. Attempts to address this challenge are currently underway.…”

Media multiplexity in connectivist MOOCs

“…Responses call for systems support for data aggregation [5] and the facilitation of personal learning environments [6,7]. Researchers face challenges of linking identities across multiple social media [8], with potential methods including focusing on unique behavioural patterns exhibited across platforms, informational redundancies offered by the user across platforms, and machine learning towards effective user identification [9,10].…”