Learning Analytics: what to measure?
Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure and privilege to do an afternoon session on learning analytics with a group of teachers at the Alberdingk Thijm College, Hilversum.
One of the reasons why I liked the session is because it was more a working session than a presentation. After a brief re-cap, participants brainstormed in small groups on things one might want to measure in a learning analytics context. Slide 18 below summarises the results.
In translation:
- environment, light, carbon dioxide, oxygen,temperature, colour, weather, air quality, space, familiarity, background noise
- experience, involvement, stress, boredom, well being, fear, emotions, motivation, feeling of being competent, experiencing success, compliments from teachers and other students, security, bullying, acceptance
- duration of instruction, attention, learning effects, learning time, measuring every 10 mins whether you get through, best moments for instruction, before or after break, visual or auditory, result
- physical condition, sleep, eating, brain activity, heart rhytm, movement, teacher and student, breathing, voice, conductance, palm humidity
- web sites (related to learning or not), search activity, how long, relationship with domain being learned, facebook, alertness, thinking steps, brain activity
- social, pairing good with less good students or friends, gender, age, talking, keyword extraction, English or Dutch, space, quantity, interaction, between teacher and student,
- teacher behavior, walking around, interaction, patience, voice, compliments, humour, choice of words, volume, duration, clothes
OK, so this is isn’t perfectly structure, but, obviously, a group of 20 teachers can identify more relevant characteristics in 20 minutes than we will know how to measure, analyse and visualise in the next 20 months 
Maybe you have some additional suggestions for things we could also measure?
