Tore Hoel

Learning Technology Standards Adoption How to Improve Process and Product Legitimacy

Standardisation of learning technologies as a co-ordinated design activity needs legitimacy to attract the necessary support from its stakeholders. This paper identifies the need for a theoretical model of such standardisation and offers an analysis of two pivotal concepts in such a theory, process legitimacy and product legitimacy.

Ethical and privacy issues in the application of learning analytics

The large-scale production, collection, aggregation, and processing of information from various learning platforms and online environments have led to ethical and privacy concerns regarding potential harm to individuals and society. In the past, these types of concern have impacted on areas as diverse as computer science, legal studies and surveillance studies. Within a European consortium that brings together the EU project LACE, the SURF SIG Learning Analytics, the Apereo Foundation and the EATEL SIG dataTEL, we aim to understand the issues with greater clarity, and to find ways of overcoming the issues and research challenges related to ethical and privacy aspects of learning analytics practice. This interactive workshop aims to raise awareness of major ethics and privacy issues. It will also be used to develop practical solutions to advance the application of learning analytics technologies.

Remote topic maps in learning

Topic Maps is becoming a recognized way of structuring and navigating knowledge. Since the digital world is moving towards a more and more service oriented reality, it is appropriate to focus on solutions for using topicmaps remotely as services. Two current cases for how this can be done is displayed here, both carried out by Cerpus AS, a small Norwegian company that works with topicmaps in the e-Learning domain. This is discussed in the light of topicmaps in a service-oriented architecture and along the axis of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and personal learning environments (PLEs). We conclude that using remote topicmaps is a viable road to travel in the learning domain, as well as in other domains.

Learning Technology Standards Adoption Process Improvement and Output Legitimacy

In the context of a theoretical model on process and product legitimacy of Learning technology standards development and adoption proposed by the authors in 2008, this paper discusses recent activity and progress in the Learning, Educational and Training (LET) standards domain. In January 2010 experts from Europe and USA gathered in the United Kingdom to discuss the “Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education”. It is the presented position papers, case studies and recorded discourse from this conference, which provides data to which is used to test the validity of the model itself. The Process and Product Legitimacy model was found to still support necessary discourse towards an improved LET standardisation process, even if a new area of discourse related to Intellectual Property Rights was identified as not covered in the model and thus calls for further work.

Could European eGovernment Policy Initiatives, in Effect, be Stifling the Development of Learning Technologies?

European eGovernment initiatives give standards boards a prominent role in the governance of standards and specifications for Learning, Education and Training. One of the instruments of governance is a standards catalogue, which is intended to guide users towards appropriate standards to implement. However, these initiatives coincide with a debate of the value of formal standards versus community specifications. The authors analyse the standards catalogue approach against a horizon scan report of current standardisation projects in the sector. They suggest that eGovernment standards boards should focus on semantic, organisational, cultural, political and legal interoperability, in preference to attempting to stabilise practice around a limited number of technical interoperability standards.

ICOPER Big Picture Modelling the Central Concepts of Competency-Driven Learning

Competency based learning is seen as a means to make the educational system more adapt to cater for , the learners’ professional development and the need to increase their future employability. The ICOPER Best Practice Network is exploring the ways competencies can drive authoring use of educational content. The aim of the ICOPER project is to create a reference model for competency-driven learning. Before all the bits and pieces come together iterative rounds of “big picture” conceptual modelling is taking place.

Standards for smart education – towards a development framework

Smart learning environments (SLEs) utilize a range of digital technologies in supporting learning, education and training; they also provide a prominent signpost for how future learning environments might be shaped. Thus, while innovation proceeds, SLEs are receiving growing attention from the research community, outputs from which are discussed in this paper. Likewise, this broad application of educational digital technologies is also the remit of standardization in an ISO committee, also discussed in this paper. These two communities share a common interest in, conceptualizing this emerging domain with the aim to identifying direction to further development. In doing so, terminology issues arise along with key questions such as, ‘how is smart learning different from traditional learning?’ Presenting a bigger challenge is the question, ‘how can standardization work be best scoped in todays innovation-rich, networked, cloud-based and data-driven learning environments?’ In responding, this conceptual paper seeks to identify candidate constructs and approaches that might lead to stable, coherent and exhaustive understanding of smart learning environments, thereby providing standards development for learning, education and training a needed direction. Based on reviews of pioneering work within smart learning, smart education and smart learning environments we highlight two models, a cognitive smart learning model and a smartness level model. These models are evaluated against current standardization challenges in the field of learning, education and training to form the basis for a development platform for new standards in this area.

The influence of data protection and privacy frameworks on the design of learning analytics systems

Learning analytics open up a complex landscape of privacy and policy issues, which, in turn, influence how learning analytics systems and practices are designed. Research and development is governed by regulations for data storage and management, and by research ethics. Consequently, when moving solutions out the research labs implementers meet constraints defined in national laws and justified in privacy frameworks. This paper explores how the OECD, APEC and EU privacy frameworks seek to regulate data privacy, with significant implications for the discourse of learning, and ultimately, an impact on the design of tools, architectures and practices that now are on the drawing board. A detailed list of requirements for learning analytics systems is developed, based on the new legal requirements defined in the European General Data Protection Regulation, which from 2018 will be enforced as European law. The paper also gives an initial account of how the privacy discourse in Europe, Japan, South-Korea and China is developing and reflects upon the possible impact of the different privacy frameworks on the design of LA privacy solutions in these countries. This research contributes to knowledge of how concerns about privacy and data protection related to educational data can drive a discourse on new approaches to privacy engineering based on the principles of Privacy by Design. For the LAK community, this study represents the first attempt to conceptualise the issues of privacy and learning analytics in a cross-cultural context. The paper concludes with a plan to follow up this research on privacy policies and learning analytics systems development with a new international study.

Questions as Data: Illuminating the Potential of Learning Analytics through Questioning an Emergent Field

In providing a meta-analysis of a series of workshop papers and questions arising on the emergent field of learning analytics, this paper contributes to the ongoing formation of a shared research agenda. The first ICCE Learning Analytics workshop in 2014 demonstrated the effectiveness of a focused questioning session for collecting relevant data beyond the content of the papers themselves. In December 2014, approximately 40 participants attended the workshop held in Nara, Japan, and contributed to the collection of open research questions. Six papers were presented covering topics including scope; interoperability standards; privacy and control of individual data, extracting data from learning content and processes; and the development of conceptual frameworks. These papers established a base from which the group generated a set of questions that invite further investigation. Utilising the first stage of the Question Formulation Technique, a pedagogical approach designed to stimulate student inquiry, a prominent finding from the workshop that questions emerging from focused inquiry provide a useful set of data in their own right. With an explicit workshop focus on learning analytics interoperability, this paper reports on the emergent issues identified in the workshop and the kinds of questions associated with each issue in the context of current research in the field of learning analytics. The study considers the complexity arising from the fact that data associated with learning is itself becoming a digital learning resource while also enabling analysis of learner behaviours and systems usage.

Standards as enablers for innovation in education - the breakdown of European pre-standardisation

Content industries go through a demanding time adjusting to the digital age, revamping their business processes when sales of paper documents are not an option any more. Formal standardisation is facing the same challenges as organisations like ISO and CEN see sales of publications as their core business. This paper presents a case study from European pre-standardisation. CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies was in 2013 put on hold due to the threat the European standardisation body CEN sees to its business model. The conflict is centred on open work processes, and open and freely available documents. Standardisation experts in education claim that stakeholder engagement, input from research, and willingness to implement the developed standards will be harmed by following CENs strict interpretation of their rules. Open Research, Open innovation, Open Data and a series of other open policies are now values that make up the foundation for driving the Innovation cycle underlying standardisation activities. Barriers to openness could hamper participation from research and restrict implementations and user engagement.