In the last article in this series, we introduced you to eLearning Analytics. We talked about the power of looking under the hood of your online courses and accessing mountains of data that can be readily available to you. If you haven’t yet heard of eLearning Analytics, or want to start with the basics, feel free to head back to review.

In the next few posts, I want to get you familiarized with some of the foundations of eLearning Analytics–in essence, a little about why and how this technology can change eLearning.

A quick note: many of the ideas put forth in the upcoming posts are not necessarily new. A lot of them come from the current web analytics industry. Particularly, I find Avinash Kaushik‘s ideas and writings about web analytics to be very enlightening and helpful, therefore much of what follows is adapted or translated from his work into what I think makes sense for education.

Learner Centricity

The learner should be at the center of eLearnign design, development, and evaluation. Learner centricity shouldn’t be a buzzword or a catchphrase. It should be a foundational principle for every eLearning developer, creator, designer, or stakeholder. To be learner-centric is to listen to the learner, hear his or her voice, and let that voice guide your entire eLearning process.

Many (I really want to say “most”) of us do not truly let the voice of the learner guide our process. Most of us don’t focus on the learner first. I’ve tried to define where focus is most often found, and these are the groups I’ve come up with: content-centric, technology-centric and organization-centric. You might find yourself or your organization in one (or all) of these mindsets.

Content-centric

When we’re content-centric, we proclaim content as king. We spend all our time producing, copying and pasting, and deploying content. We come dangerously close to believing that the content speaks for itself–that since it’s “out there,” it’s learnable. We give the student large portions of content to consume, and leave it up to that same student to process, retain, and apply all of that knowledge, essentially on their own.

Organization-centric

When we’re organization centric, we tend to rely solely on our culture, methodologies or processes or people to guide the process. We might rely on HPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). We might rely on committees to tell us how learners will react, or engineers to tell us how things should and can be done. Or the product manager, producer, or designer might own the entire experience. We ultimately think that we can somehow place ourselves in the mindset of the learner, designing courses to fit our individual preferences, biases, likes and dislikes, all the while foolishly thinking that our experiences then automatically apply to our learner’s.

Technology-centric

A technology-centric mindset involves bells and whistles that dress up content. It is a mindset that believes that as long as we present the content with the newest technologies, it will be more effective, and learners will learn it. Whatever’s new is what works. We might blindly follow the latest and greatest, thinking that newer and newer technology will always lead to better and better learning experiences.

Learner-centric

To be learner-centric is to place the learner at the center of everything you do. All other methods and means of designing, producing, or delivering education should be secondary to the voice of the learner. In the business and eCommerce world, this is called being customer-centric. To be fair, hearing and heeding the voice of the customer is a little easier than doing the same with the voice of the learner. Why? Because when we’re talking about customers, we want to maximize and optimize what they want. We want to understand what they’re looking for, and deliver it to them in the quickest, most efficient way possible. With education, it’s a little different. We’re delivering something to them, and in many cases, no matter how naive or optimistic we want to be, they might not want it. There is still, however, a fundamental need for listening to the learner. Let me explain.

To hear and heed the voice of the learner isn’t necessarily to give them the reins and let them dictate the entire process. To be learner-centric is much more about understanding your audience. To understand how they listen, what they like/dislike about your delivery, what they do/don’t respond to, and where they spend their time when left alone. To be metaphorical, it’s much more like building a canal and afterward observing where the water wants to go, then adapting the channels and waterways to optimize the flow.

So much of learning right now is a jump-through-the-hoop, industrialized, assembly line approach where a learner is subjected to a pounding of content and technology. We use a one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter approach to learning. We struggle to understand what works and what doesn’t, and we wonder why our canals don’t work and water seems to be flowing everywhere but where it needs to go. This is important, because often learning influences future learning, learning influences performance, and learning very often influences organizational revenue. If you provide learning, you automatically have a vested interest in knowing that learning has occurred.

eLearning analytics can help us bring the learner back to the table. We use eLearning analytics as a tool to try and hear the voice of the learner. Based on what we learn from them, we can in turn better understand how to help them learn what they need to know.

Under the Hood

Image from www.currybet.net

Let’s say you own a small grocery store. You want to find out more about your customers that frequent and shop at your location. So, you begin trying to measure certain behaviors that you think will give you more information about who buys items and who doesn’t. You might impose a quick survey on customers that enter your store, or you could follow someone around as they make shopping choices. You could write down what they pick up, how long they examine a can of green beans, and how often they decide against buying something. How much more effort would that require on your part? Would the data and analysis be worth the cost?

Now let’s switch gears: you are a classroom teacher. You want to find out more about how your students are studying and learning the material. You want to find out what makes a successful student in your class. So, similarly, you could develop some intensive research methods to understand student behaviors that lead to success. You could sit behind a student and watch them read material. You could follow them home and see how long they study their textbooks. You could record how long it takes them to read a chapter. You could give them surveys throughout the class to see how confident they are in the material they’ve learned.

Of course, neither of these situations are practical and might sound silly. Neither a grocery store owner nor a classroom teacher have the resources to carry out these methods, the time to execute them, or the ability to measure and observe at a basic level more than one student at a time.

Now let’s switch gears once more. You’re invested in online learning. You want to understand how learners are using your course. You want to find out how successful students achieved their success. You want to find out what works and what doesn’t. What if you could take this information, analyze it, and make meaningful changes to your course to positively affect learning outcomes for your students?

You can. I’m not talking about a new LMS (Learning Management System) that enslaves your organization or another authoring tool that requires a steeper learning curve. What I’m talking about, essentially, is putting your ear to the ground and listening. I’m talking about opening the hood to all of the data that is already available to you and bringing it together in a meaningful, actionable way. I’m talking about eLearning Analytics.

What is eLearning Analytics?

Image from www.users.csbsju.edu

eLearning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing online learning content. I’ll admit I’m plagiarizing a little with that statement—it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on Web analytics. Truth is, no history or definition of eLearning Analytics would be complete without at least a summarized look at the history of Web analytics.

Let me sum up Web analytics’ history as quickly as I can: much like the grocery store owner, people who began selling things on the internet wanted to know more about their customers. They saw that money could be made, but they had no idea as to the potential revenue they were missing out on. How many people get confused while checking out and quit? How many people can’t find what they want? How many people simply aren’t interested in what you’re selling? So folks decided to start looking under the hood.

As a citizen of the internet, whether you browse or “surf,” you are revealing quite a bit about yourself. Not necessarily personal information (that’s another topic), but simple things like who your internet service provider is, what browser you use, your connection speed, things of that nature. People started to aggregate these bite sized pieces of information over time, so you ended up with a log or history of requests for web pages made by people’s computers.

Then folks started to realize that you can calculate a lot based on those logs. They saw that you could estimate how long someone spent on a page, how long their overall visit to your site lasted, and much much more. Eventually, people started manipulating and analyzing all of this information and acting on it. They thought, “Well, if we can make the experience better, maybe we can sell more stuff.” They were right. Companies that effectively used this technology started seeing results. Other companies then said “Hey, maybe we can help others do this.” The Web analytics industry was born.

Why eLearning Analytics?

You might be wondering, “So others can make more money by analyzing and optimizing their online shopping carts. So what? What’s that got to do with education?”

I hope that the answer to what this has to do with education is already apparent to you. What if, instead of using Web analytics to measure and report and solve for revenue, we used it to solve for educational outcomes? For learning objectives? For increased performance? For better learning experiences? What if we could understand, even at a basic level, how learners are using our online courses, how effective the content is, and even how learners feel after they were finished?

With eLearning Analytics, you can.

In the next article, we’ll dive a little deeper. How do we gather the data? What do we look for? What is important?

If you’ve been looking for this sort of thing for a long time and can’t wait any longer, I’d love to talk to you more about what my company offers. However, this series of articles is meant to be purely educational. I think this topic is important enough that it doesn’t need to be hidden behind a sales pitch. I think if we do this right, we change online learning. We break out of page turning, boring, almost completely ineffective online courses. We stop jumping through hoops and we start to see what online learning really can do.