Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

As in previous years, it would be quite easy to fill a whole article in this series on “data insecurity,” on the data breaches and cyberattacks that continue to plague education – both schools and software. The issue extends well beyond education technology, of course, and in 2017 we witnessed yet again a number of high profile incidents (including some corporate admissions of breaches that had happened in years past): that over 140 million Social Security Numbers and other personal data had been stolen in a data breach at Equifax, for starters; that every single account at Yahoo – some 3 billion in all – had been affected in its 2013 breach.

To assist European universities to become more mature users and custodians of digital data about their students as they learn online, the SHEILA project will build a policy development framework that promotes formative assessment and personalized learning, by taking advantage of direct engagement of stakeholders in the development process.

Higher ed students believe universities can improve in the next 10 years by tracking their information.

PURPOSE
This project aims to develop a better understanding of learning analytics and the ways in which analytics can be interpreted, applied and actioned by teachers to improve teaching and learning practices.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The great diversity of the student body in Australian universities is reflected in students' ages, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, motivations and experiences with technology. University teachers are also increasingly reliant on – and expected to use – a range of technologies to support student learning both on and off campus. In designing and delivering online learning activities to meet diverse student needs, teachers commonly face educational challenges. This project will identify common problems faced by teachers and students when learning online, and determine the types of learning analytics teachers would find useful to effectively address these problems.

As college students click, swipe and tap through their daily lives—both in the classroom and outside of it—they’re creating a digital footprint of how they think, learn and behave that boggles the mind.

“We’re standing under a waterfall, feasting on information that’s never existed before,” said Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist and associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “All of this data has the power to redefine higher education.”

Functionally, the purpose of assessment is to provide data to revise planned instruction.

In seeing what a student understands, the best path for moving forward towards mastery can be planned based on those results—the “data,” as it were.

While there are inherent (and perhaps crippling) flaws with any form of assessment (what is the best way to determine what a student understands?), assessment design is a topic for another day. For now, it can help to simply understand data better—for its benefits and perhaps more importantly, its limits.