Signs, redux
Five years ago, I made this blog entry. It is as timely now as it was then. Nothing dramatic on the personal front this time, though. The work front, however, is full of changed priorities. I was pleased to learn that two proposals for the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) that I have been involved with have been selected for funding. Working on these research projects will consume most of my “spare” time until the end of March so I won’t have much time left over to pursue other business development ventures with as much intensity as I had hoped. This is all good! It has served as a wake-up call: my first passion is learning analytics and it seems foolish to pretend otherwise. Interestingly, news of my receipt of award precipitated a conversation with an old colleague about a new international business partnership, which I will pursue over the next few months.
We are currently in the process of assembling our “dream team” to work on the two MRI projects (there is also a third project that is very loosely coupled with the two on which I’m working) and it’s been an exciting couple of weeks. I have spun up an analytics cluster to handle the heavy lifting with the “Big Data” that we have. (Note: Educational Big Data is not as big as Big Data proper… I’m dealing with data in the tens-of-gigabytes range, not the petabyte monsters that folks over in Business Intelligence have to deal with. But it’s still “Big Data” compared to the usual sort of stuff that comes out of educational research.) So for now, no work on the “Innovation Support System”. Instead, lots of work on learning analytics applied to MOOCs! I find it interesting that on the work front I am spinning up multi-core linux servers to run Hadoop clusters, while on the personal hobby front I’m installing the same operating system on a credit-card sized Raspberry Pi computer. Who knew that understanding linux could be so useful?
We are striving to use an “open learning science” framework (applying principles from the Open Science Framework to the Learning Sciences) and to that end we hope to create a blog and wiki to document our experiences in taking our Coursera data and running analyses that try to get at student motivation, intention, and behaviour. As soon as we’re live I’ll post a link to our new site.