The OxCrowd Network

OxCrowd: (Networked) Learning Analytics

About

Online social learning is not analogous to face-to-face learning. It is informed by a different set of pedagogical aims and cultural values. Specifically, the shift to participatory learning necessitates re-thinking the instructor’s and learners’ role and thus the learning design. From the technical point of view, social media platforms hosting knowledge construction discussions now produce a huge amount of timely data, which records each interaction between learners, between learners and content and between learners and the platform itself. These diverse sets of recorded interactions have been scaling up our opportunities to study and assess social learning. For all these reasons, Carmel Kent suggests that online learning should not be designed, conceptualized or assessed with traditional learning tools.

In this talk, Dr Kent will suggest viewing the process of online social learning as a set of interactions (between learners, content, instructors and other agents). Learning is thus a dynamic process of gradually constructing networks of interactions, revealing individual learning intertwined with the collective learning of its community. Dr Kent will present a series of studies, conducted with colleagues from various disciplines, based on the notion of interactions learning networks and will strive for questions about networked learning design and assessment.

Dr Kent will suggest frameworks for the quantitative analysis of online discussions in learning communities, which are based on networks structural characteristics and web analytics; present topology design which supports interactivity; establish a link from theories from the learning, social and information sciences and present empirical results.

The hashtag to use for tweeting about this event is #OxCrowd