Among my major “takeaways” from this year’s Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting, held in Washington, D.C from Feb. 14-16, were “next gen” mobile apps for teaching and learning and an exciting set of tools dubbed “learning analytics.”
Instructional technologists, faculty and students are quickly moving beyond the notion of simply repackaging existing academic and library content for display on mobile devices to using handhelds in the classroom for organizing group activities, impromptu assessments, creating and sharing personal research, and more. One session, featuring faculty from the University of Maryland, that captured a number of these applications “from computer science to journalism to digital storytelling” was Mobile Learning: Faculty Stories (video not available).
The topic of learning analytics returned again and again throughout the ELI sessions. In Open Education Resources and Learning Analytics: Shaping the Future…, David Wiley argued that we can systematically improve the quality of education and identify students who need special assistance (even before problems arise) by studying the structures and patterns of their interaction with course web sites. John Campbell deepened this theme the next day with his presentation, Opening the Door to New Possibilities Through the Use of Analytics.
Additional videos of selected sessions from the ELI 2011 Annual Meeting are now available online.
