In today's LAK12 MOOC presentation, John Campbell of Purdue's Signals Project stated that there are two important skills domains in learning analytics: technical AND teaching/learning. In fact, both must be present in order to effectively design tools in learning analytics. He stated that both of these sets are very difficult to find in one person, and at Purdue, they have had the most luck in looking for people with the teaching & learning skillset and THEN training them for the technical side.
So here's the question: For success in learning analytics, what teaching & learning skills would you look for? What technical skills?
With respect to teaching and learning: knowledge of pedagogical models, and the ability to analyse existing courses in these terms, and design or adapt existing designs for learning; a thorough understanding of student behavior learned in the trenches of many classroom hours.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to technical: comprehensive administrator knowledge in the LMS in use; database; data analysis; ability to configure and set parameters in open source packages; and in an ideal world the ability to adapt and extend open source packages and contribute to open source projects.
Maybe it's because we're kiwis that we do in fact have quite a few people that have the combined skill set. They are largely computer science tutors and professors with a hacker streak in them.