A new dawn for learning analytics in UK HE

An excellent paper has been produced by Jisc: Learning analytics - The current state of play in UK higher and further education.

Twelve universities and colleges are reviewed, and there is little common ground among the participating institutions in the analytics systems they are using.

The 'outcomes' are:   

Most interviewees are reluctant to claim any significant outcomes from their learning analytics activities to date – again perhaps demonstrating that it is still early days for the technologies and processes.

Several of the participants mention the strong correlation they have found between attendance and achievement. At Manchester Metropolitan it was found that students who submit assignments at the last minute or who have a high proportion of off - campus night time activity are more likely to fail.

Oxford Brookes finds that their dashboards have helped to identify issues with BME achievement on particular courses.

Derby has used analytics to dissect attainment across its student population in order to throw a spotlight on areas where it can target interventions. It can evidence impact on BME as well as overall student attainment.

Both East London and Bedfordshire report that anecdotally student attendance seems to have increased, perhaps because students know that their presence is being monitored.

Encouragingly, at Nottingham Trent the interventions taken by tutors as a result of the analytics are almost always followed by an improvement in engagement. In addition some of the tutors there present the individual student dashboards to the whole tutorial group to prompt discussions about progress  –and this is reportedly motivational to the students.

Several interviewees have found that a significant outcome of the analytics work has been improved connections between disparate parts of their organisations. Some, such as Loughborough and Activate Learning, also mention the sense of ownership that staff feel over the tools or the positive reception they have received, and how important this has been in their adoption.

Leak of personal data from 4000 people at Toyama University

Toyama University has revealed that one computer belonging to the Toyama Unit Center under the university’s Medical Department was infected by seven types of malware when the PC downloaded free software in early June.

The Toyama Unit Center participated in the national survey of children’s health and environment by the Japanese Ministry of Environment to elucidate what kind of impact chemicals in the living environment would have on children’s health.

About 5,300 parents and children who reside in the Toyama Prefecture, central part of the Japanese mainland, participated in the survey between February 2011 and March 2014.

The infected PC has personal information belonging to about 4,000 of 5,300 people such as the name, date of birth, area to live, and past birth and illness history of mothers in six cities or towns in the prefecture.

The Ministry of Environment requested each unit center to store personal information in PCs which are not connected to the Internet, but the university stored part of the personal information on a different PC, which professors use.

Academics lack understanding to make business-university links work

There is an interesting article in THES this week that reports academics lack the commercial understanding needed to make a business-university collaboration work.

The article references a report: Building Successful Collaborations: The SME’s Viewpoint on Partnering with a University compiled by data firm Beauhurst.  Cultural differences between businesses and academics are huge, communication and relationship management from an early stage is crucial, 32% of businesses feel their business potential is not understood.

I am surprised no mention is made of university-business centres such as Begbroke Science Part at Oxford and ThinkSpace at Imperial??

Windows 10 and Privacy  

Microsoft has come under fire from privacy campaigners for collecting information from private files, e-mails and address books owned by its users.

Individuals’ speech, handwriting and typing habits are also being collected, as are call logs, the names of people listed in calendar appointments and information about what people buy online.

An article in the Register reports, '"Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties," the privacy warriors at European Digital Rights told the FT on Monday.'

The Register's article has a guide explaining how to configure Windows 10 to change privacy options to make the Operating System more secure.