Learning analytics at Penn State

What is Penn State planning to do with learning analytics?  As a faculty member at Penn State, I'm interested in this question, so I've tried to explore this question over the past few months.

In April, several individuals from across Penn State's campuses virtually attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative event on learning analytics.

Also in April, a presentation by Chris Millet, Simon Hooper, and Bart Pursel, individuals from various educational technology groups at the University, was held at University Park.  This presentation offered to the campus community a background on learning analytics and outlined current work being done in learning analytics, which includes:
          --Early Progress Report: this is a low-level use of LA which is nonetheless helpful to students and faculty as it automates the process of alerting faculty and academic advisers of students who are receiving a C or less in any course as of the third week of the semester.  Not only is the faculty alert automated, but students also receive an email message alerting them to their own progres. 
           --examination of the relationship between blog and wiki posting in the learning management system with course GPA. Do students who are more connected and communicative with course colleagues fare better in terms of grades?
            --Simon Hooper is helping faculty design better multiple choice tests by analyzing student performance on discrete test questions and comparing it to overall GPA and performance on other assignments involving specific learning objectives.  In doing so, "bad" test questions -- those that don't discriminate well between those who have mastered a specific learning objective and those who haven't -- can be eliminated or redesigned.

Then in May I met with Chris Millet from Teaching and Learning with Technology, Penn State's educational technologies group.  He had just returned from LAK12, the Second Annual Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge and he graciously shared with me some of what he learned at that conference.  Millet also described some of the work of a recently-formed Learning Analytics group that has been charged by Penn State Provost Robert Pangborn to explore and implement the use of learning analytics at the University.

There still is a lot of work to be done in developing capacity in this area at the University.  The choice of a new learning management system to replace ANGEL, our current LMS, will also impact the adoption of learning analytics.  Many LMSs now have learning analytics components built in.  Unfortunately any University-wide implementation of learning analytics will be hampered by the College of Medicine's choice to adopt Moodle, which is one of the LA systems that apparently is not being considered by groups elsewhere at the University.  Furthermore, according to Millet, only about 75% of faculty across PSU have even adopted ANGEL, the current LMS.  Will the numbers improve with a new LMS? Perhaps the 25% of faculty who have not adopted ANGEL have good pedagogical reasons for not doing so -- maybe they're using technology in other ways. 

I noted with interest this quote from Chris Millet concerning data sources for LA: "The analysis of this data, coming from a variety of sources like the LMS, the library, and the student information system, helps us observe and understand learning behaviors in order to enable appropriate interventions.”  Again, mention of the library as a source of data.  Yet I wonder how many librarians know about learning analytics and are currently considering how libraries might be involved?

#LAK12 upcoming EDUCAUSE learning analytics focus session

The announcement about the ELI 2012 Online Spring Focus Session on learning analytics arrived in my inbox yesterday. Yet again, the reference to libraries:

"The analysis of this data, coming from a variety of sources like the LMS, the library, and the student information system, helps us observe and understand learning behaviors in order to enable appropriate interventions. "

Because EDUCAUSE's focus is the management and use of and leadership in information resources, librarians are a significant portion of the group's constituency. So I'm glad, in fact, that librarians are explicitly listed in the focus session announcement as a target audience.

However, since the sharing of user data (at least personally identifiable) would seem to be against the librarians' professional code of ethics, I'm still stumped as to how libraries have been placed as possible participants in the learning analytics sphere. Don't get me wrong...I'm glad to have been asked to the party, but I'm not sure I'm going to want to dance. Some libraries are involved in analytics (for example, the Library Impact Data Project in the UK, which I learned about from commenters on this blog) and I'm curious as to how their projects work and still honor values such as intellectual freedom and user privacy.

Learning Analytics getting increasing library press...LAK12

I've been Googling "learn* analyt*" and "librar*" from time to time for about a year now. A year ago, the only things that I could find were reports, not written by librarians, that mentioned academic library data as possible fodder for learning analytics and, of course, instances wherein "library" was used in a mere data sort of way, i.e. "data library." That's starting to change. Today I found:

The Library Impact Data Project, a JISC-funded project in the UK in which systems librarians at the Univ. of Huddersfield seek to describe the relationship between library usage and student attainment; identify courses that require a high level of library usage and describe the practices that lead to this; and identify courses that do NOT require library usage and improve services to those courses. I'm definitely going to look into this one more: http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/

Stephen Abram's blog post from Jan. 3, 2012 that points to EDUCAUSE's "7 things about analytics" article, but without any analysis of it: http://stephenslighthouse.com/2012/01/03/learning-analytics/comment-page-1/#comment-19972

In 2010, this was published: Kumar,
S., Edwards, M. & Ochoa, M. (2010). Analysis of Online Students’ Use of
Embedded Library Instruction in a Graduate Educational Technology Course. which used data logs from the LMS in which library instruction was embedded to examine student usage of library resources. Far beyond the usual self-reported "preferences/how did you like it?" type of research that we often see in library-related publications.

The Sept. 2011 issues of College and Research Libraries had an article by Wong and Cmor describing a study that linked GPA to library workshop attendance with n=8,000+ students. The librarians had access to the school's ERP to do this; interestingly, the study was done at a Hong Kong university and there is little mention of any consent from the students involved, although student names were unlinked from GPA, and also no mention of an IRB-type approval process in the way we would think of it in North America. The article is at http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/5/464.full.pdf+html I imagine the only similarity between this study and true LA is the link between the library and the ERP -- a link which was enacted outside the ERP, at any rate.

The Georgia Perimeter College Libraries' GPC blog by Rebecca Rose explains,
A library application for learning analytics could be a report alerting the library to order more materials in specific subject areas, based on enrollments in specific courses. Another idea would be to get lists of students who have never experienced library instruction. http://gpclibraries.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/technology-trends-in-libraries-pt-3/

And, finally, lots of library-related blog posts referencing the 2011 Horizon Report which listed LA as a technology with a 4-5 year time horizon. Right now, these were mostly informational posts, and did not offer any visions or analysis for LA applied to libraries.

So, overall, it appears that tech-focused librarians are becoming aware of LA, but outside of a couple of projects, libraries are not involved with LA very much at all. If I'm wrong, please leave a comment and give me a clue.