The greatest barrier to the widespread impact of predictive analytics in higher education is adoption. No matter how great the technology is, if people don’t use it effectively, any potential value is lost. In the early stages of predictive analytics implementations at colleges and universities, a common obstacle comes in the form of questions that…
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Ethical AI in Higher Education: Are we doing it wrong?
In higher education, and in general, an increasing amount of attention is being paid to questions about the ethical use of data. People are working to produce principles, guidelines and ethical frameworks. This is a good thing. Despite being well-intentioned, however, most of these projects are doomed to failure. The reason is that, amidst talk…
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Liquid modernity & learning analytics: On educational data in the 21st century
I was recently interviewed for a (forthcoming) piece in eLearn Magazine. Below are my responses to a couple of key questions, reproduced here in their entirety. eLearn: You have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Could you share with us a little about your history and your work with learning analytics? TH: What drives me in my…
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The difference between IT and Ed Tech
In a recent interview with John Jantsch for the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, Danny Iny argued that the difference between information and education essentially comes down to responsibility. Information is simply about presentation. Here are some things you might want to know. Whether and the extent to which you come to know them is entirely…
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Should Ed Tech Vendors Stop Selling ‘Predictive Analytics’?
Pedantic rants about the use and misuse of language are a lot of fun. We all have our soap boxes, and I strongly encourage everyone to hop on theirs from time to time. But when we enter into conversations around the use and misuse of jargon, we must always keep two things in mind: (1)…
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Five strategies for succeeding with data in higher education
What important steps can you take to increase the success of your analytics project on campus? At the 2017 Blackboard Analytics Symposium, A. Michael Berman, VP for Technology & Innovation at CSU Channel Islands and Chief Innovation Officer for California State University, took a different approach to answering this question. Instead of asking about success,…
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Ethics and Predictive Analytics in Higher Education
In March 2017, Manuela Ekowo and Iris Palmer co-authored a report for New America that offered five guiding practices for the ethical use of predictive analytics in higher education. This kind of work is really important. It acknowledges that, to the extent that analytics in higher education is meant to have an impact on human behavior, it…
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