Learning analytics, educational data mining, formative
assessment - all recent buzz words in educational research.
In principle, the idea is to find theoretical frameworks,
models, procedures, and smart tools to collect, aggregate,
analyze, reason on and visualize large scale educational data.
LEA’s BOX is a 3-year research and development project
(running from March 2014 to December 2016) funded by the European
Commission. The project focussed on (a) making educational
assessment and appraisal more goal-oriented, proactive, and
beneficial for students, and (b) on enabling formative support
of teachers and other educational stakeholders on a solid
basis of a wide range of information about learners. That
means, LEA’s BOX offers a learning analytics toolbox
that is intended to enable educators to perform competence-centred,
multi-source learning analytics based
- the foundations of sound psycho-pedagogical
models,
- intelligent model-based reasoning
services,
- innovative visualization techniques,
and
- tailored to the very concrete
demands and requirements of teachers and learners.
Lea’s box builds
upon the existing significant and well acknowledged
body of existing work in the field of learning analytics
and offers distinct innovative Learning Analytics
features:
» As opposed to mere
statistical approaches to Learning Analytics,
Lea’s Box offers qualitative analytics
describing the set of competencies and skills
the learners have and their individual learning
paths through a learning domain instead of a
numerical average value only. The solutions
are based on well-elaborated psycho-pedagogical
theories such as Competence-based Knowledge
Space Theory (CbKST) and Formal Concept Analysis
(FCA).
» Typical dashboard-style
visualizations of learning have great advantages
and contributed to broadening the possibilities
of improving and personalizing teaching. Lea’s
Box offers new insights into learning processes
by displaying the “structure of learning”.
Directed graphs reveal the options of each individual
learner, her strengths and concrete competencies
gaps. Lea’s Box makes the step from analytics
to formative analytics.
» Sophisticated analytics … it’s all fair
and well! Learning Analytics can only have impact, however,
when user – and this means teachers as well as students
– easily understand the analytics process and its uncertainties.
Computer-driven analytics will only enrich educational practice
when the outcomes are negotiable. Lea’s Box understands
these practical needs and offers a negotiable open learner
modelling system (nOLM). The results and processes of the
analytics algorithms are opened and so are the sources of
information for the algorithms. This makes users “formatively”
understand the results and allow them to really profit from
this technology. This approach also provides the necessary
transparency for a fair and ethically correct application
of data driven assessments.
» Daily practice in schools most often means conventional
teaching and learning. Schools are still analogues places
where the collection of clean and comprehensive data sets
for analytics is near impossible. Lea’s Box offers small,
simple and easy to use in-line tools for recording data, for
keeping records, and for connecting all available sources
of information about learning, no matter if this is a manual
assessment by the teacher, a self-assessment by the student,
a Moodle quiz, or a learning game.
Lea's Box is a publicly funded project and most results
and solutions are available freely or even with an open source
licence. Check out the download page.
If you want to register for a demo account, please contact
us!
Learning
Analytics for Guitar Players!
Learning Analytics? Try
to think about it from the perspective of a guitar
player! [PDF]