Reflection on Dr. Severance's Presentation

I think I got only the key points of Severance's presentation - IMS: Learning Tools Interoperability (Severance, Feb. 25, 2013).

1. An open protocol for data sharing will save consumers lots of money.
2. LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) allows LMS to own authentic data such as student ID in local server while saving the non-authentic data in a public server. In this way, the data retrieving becomes independent from LMS and improves the chances for data interoperability. 

If learning analytics want to be applied to multiple learning system - LMS, CMS, social media -, it would be important to have a commonly accepted LTI. However, learning from the experience of SCORM which has been not very successful, IMS LTI might have a long way to go before widely adopted in the field.

Reflection on Dr. Fritz's Presentation

I was especially impressed by the final part of the presentation in which Dr. Fritz (Fritz, Feb. 20, 2012) talked about the benefits of providing learning information to people.

Using Learning Analytics to Scale Peer Feedback as AN Intervention Strategy: How might we learn from others?

1. If you were given chances to do some observation, you learn to distinguish themselves with others, they will try to emulate this and then, try to practice (self-control), and finally become better (self-regulation). ~ Self-regulated learning (Zimmerman).
2. If people were given better choice tools, they would make better choices. If you gave people opportunities to compare themselves with others, more often, they will learn something in a more scalable way. How we design our LMS that allow students and instructors to compare with others?

Reflection on Dr. Whitmer's Presentation

After listening to J. Whitmer's presentation on "Student Achievement: Large Hybrid Courses" (Whitmer, Feb. 19, 2012), I have learned the followings:

1. The findings we can get by comparing students' uses of LMS or characteristics revealed limited information which would improve the teaching. 
2. How, instead of how many times, the students interact with LMS (content, assessment, etc.) is all that matter to students' success in learning. 
3. This presentation demonstrated a good way to present my dissertation during the proposal and the final defense. 

Questions: I was not able to find the presentation slides from Slideshare.net using the URL given at the end of Dr. Whitmer's presentation.

What I have learned in the first week

The first week of LAK13 course is over. Although I tried to catch up with all the reading materials, discussions and self-presences, I was able to engage only part of them. RE: Assigment 1 I think I will take the advice from George's representation and play with the data that I can access with easily. I am thinking to adopt one of the LA tools that I newly learned, e.g. GATE, Gephi