I'm listening to the recording of the talk by Dragan Gasevic that I missed last week (when I'd missed the fact that it was at a different time :-))
I've been struggling to follow until he started talking about the concrete example of what they do in their own place. I can see how this is useful there, but I cannot link it to my own teaching... I've been thinking why.
It has something to do with the kind of course, which might have to be:
- large (with so many students that the teacher doesn't know them all)
- most interaction with learning material & other students online,
- a domain that can be modelled well (how else can we analyze the content of students' messages or contributions)
- a certain kind of content; some set of concepts or knowledge that is explained or 'delivered' in web resources...
The latter seems in contradiction with Dragan's claim that he does not believe in 'pizza delivery'.
My discovery of the week: I have realized that I do believe that learner analytics can be immensely useful to enable students to self-direct their learning. Big problem with that is that -even though we know that self-directed learning is good for retention and transfer- most students aren't interested in investing all that time and effort, they are interested in doing as little as possible to make their exam. Of course, there are exceptions... among which the participants of this course :-)
Some things I'm allergic to, though. Evidence-based education... measure whether some treatment works... hey guys, education and medicine cannot be compared so easily. For one thing, in medicine it doesn't matter which doctor prescribes the pills, in education that is not true. And if we know one thing from research it is that the teacher is an important success (or failure) factor. It would be more fair to compare education to psychotherapy really, where the bond between client and therapist has been identiefied as the main success factor. I'll stop moaning about one of my hobby horses now..
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