DesignLAK22

Welcome to the DesignLAK22 Workshop

The 7th Annual DesignLAK Workshop addresses the challenge of visualising the alignment between learning outcomes, activities, behaviour, and achievement to inform feedback on learners’ progress and refinement of course design. Many advances have been made in the field of learning analytics (LA) that have focused on ways that learner behaviours and performance can be visualised for educators and learners. However, there is an ongoing tension between the value of representations of learner behaviour and activity versus a focus on performance and progression outcomes. To reap the potential benefits of LA greater consideration needs to be given to how learning design and models of learner progress can inform the design of analytics and visualisations to enable the provision of pedagogically appropriate feedback to learners while also providing information that can be used by educators to refine course design. In this interactive, half-day workshop participants will be given the opportunity to explore these points of intersection between LA measures, models of learner progress, and learning design. Using the Learning Design Studio tool (Law et al., 2017), participants will also have a chance to create visualisations that can provide feedback to learners and educators to enhance learning progress and design.

Workshop Design

The workshop will start with an icebreaker activity to allow participants to get to know one another (this may be done in activity groups if the numbers are large). The DesignLAK team will then provide a brief overview of the ideas, models, and previous DesignLAK outcomes that will inform the rest of the activities in the workshop. The workshop will then be split into three main parts:

Part 1 begins with an introduction to the conceptual framework underpinning the LDS platform, followed by a brief introduction to an authentic course design for use in the activities. Emphasis will be placed on the multilevel, hierarchically nested nature of pedagogical decision making, and the need for alignment between intended learning outcomes, pedagogical approach, task sequence and assessment. Participants will then be divided into small groups of 5 - 6 members to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the course design, and to identify one learning outcome and the efficacy of the associated learning tasks that they would like to investigate. The whole workshop group will then reconvene in plenary, during which each activity group will report on the LA questions they would like to explore in the third part of the workshop. This will be followed by a 15- minute break.

In Part 2 participants will reconvene in their groups where they will be asked to consider the alignment of the elements they identified in Part 1 to the assessment design, with reference to a learner progress model. The purpose of this activity is to open up ideas around the ways that the analytics could be visualised for educators and learners.

Part 3 of the workshop begins with a brief introduction to the visualisations that can be generated in LDS, and provision of a set of anonymised data from an authentic implementation of the exemplar course. Participants will then return to their breakout groups to develop a visualisation(s). Each group will evaluate the appropriateness of the visualisation for LD refinement and feedback to learners based on their group’s exploration.

The overall outcomes of these activities would be reported in plenary. The workshop will close with participants sharing reflections on the intersection of LA/LD, the models and systems presented, and the resulting visualisations.