I’ve travelled to the Open University at Milton Keynes for the first UK SoLAR Flare. I’m braced for being bombarded with graphs and have added my fair share on my two slides. I’ve taken the opportunity to present some ideas about assessment analytics and to get a feel for the key areas of interest and debate amongst the movers and shakers in this emerging field. It’s great to put some faces to names, particularly the names of people whose work I’ve been reading.

Simon Buckinghum-Shum kicked off the day with a really helpful overview of the state of play and a reminder of the importance of this whole field. We’ve had a slew of lightning presentations, including my own, with lots of graphs and social network diagrams. As expected there is a heavy emphasis on Social Network Analytics (SNA). So far there has been no mention of assessment data or analytics beyond a passing reference to student grades by Dai Griffiths in his really helpful presentation about the potential dangers of learning analytics, Jean Mutton talking about measuring whether students collected their feedback or not and Chris Ballard’s general mention of ‘grades’ in his presentation from Tribal Labs. This does keep me wondering if I’m missing something or involved in a separate conversation but I continue to be convinced that assessment analytics is a blind spot. It was great to hear from Mark Stubbs about the really powerful things that their work at MMU has been able to find and the important point that he raises is that we need to find better ways to feed this through to students and teachers.

Before lunch we organised ourselves into breakout groups to discuss key themes. I joined a small group looking at dashboards with other groups looking at things like retention and success, engagement and data management. All groups fed back after lunch and it was note resting to hear just how many of the key issues cross over the multiple themes. Mark Stubbs offered a timely warning about ‘can’t count, doesn’t count’ and Simon Buckinghum-Shum talking about the potential for learning analytics to measure process which raises the possibility that we may be able to rely less on end of task assessment results in the future which is really pleasing to hear. Martin Hawksey mentioned the implications that may come with the possible new My Data legislation and for a population that is more data aware. Some of the frustrations and tensions about learning analytics emerged in the discussion after this which was interesting and highlighted the complex and sometimes conflicting demands being placed on it.

It’s clear that this is still an immature field and there is lots still to be done in terms of realising operationalisation.