Due to rapid advancements in our ability to collect, process, and analyze massive amounts of data, it is now possible for educational institutions to gain new insights into how people learn (Kumar, 2013). E-learning has become an important part of education, and this form of learning is especially suited to the use of big data and data analysis,…

Learning technologies are now commonplace in education, and generate large volumes of educational data. Scholars have argued that analytics can and should be employed to optimize learning and learning environments. This article explores what is really meant by "analytics", describes the current best-known examples of institutional…

Data-informed instructional methods offer tremendous promise for increasing the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and schooling. Yet-to-be-developed data science approaches have the potential to dramatically advance instruction for every student and to enhance learning for people of all ages. Next steps that emerged from a recent National…

Various types of structured data collected by learning management systems such as Moodle have been used to improve student learning outcomes. Learning analytics refers to an assortment of data analysis methods used for this task. These methods typically do not consider unstructured data such as blogs, discussions, e-mail, and course messages.…

The increasing availability of digital data in higher education provides an extraordinary resource for researchers to undertake educational research, targeted at understanding challenges facing the sector. Big data can stimulate new ways to transform processes relating to learning and teaching, and helps identify useful data, sources of evidence…

Dartmouth and MIT have developed educational behavior apps and wearable devices that collect contiguous streams of data from student users. Given the consent of the user, the app collects information about a student's physical activity, sleep patterns, and location to form conjectures about social and academic behavior. These apps have the…

An interdisciplinary approach from linguistics, information sciences, learning sciences, and educational technology is used to explore the concept of information. Several key issues are highlighted, including: (1) learning language through meaning or probability; (2) the situational difference between message and meaning; (3) relationship between…

Human competence is a vital element for any organization that expects to survive and then thrive. Developing individual performance ability is necessary but not sufficient because trained people alone will not make an organization successful. We must determine what people should deliver and why it should be delivered in order to add measurable…

While engaged in academic reading, a university provost converged on an idea to use a preferential approach to students' selection of college courses, similar to the recommendation systems used by "Netflix" and "Amazon." The result of this idea came to be known as "Degree Compass" and was implemented on the campus of…

The Quantified Self (QS) movement is a growing global effort to use new mobile and wearable technologies to automatically obtain personal data about everyday activities. The social and material infrastructure associated with the Quantified Self (QS) movement provides a number of ideas that educational technologists should consider incorporating…

Educational technologists may advance the state of the field by increasing capacity to develop software tools and instructional applications. Presently, few academic programs in educational technology require even a single computer programming course. Further, the educational technologists who develop software generally work independently or in…

Twelve high schools in North Carolina piloted a 1:1 learning initiative, where every student and teacher received a laptop computer with wireless Internet access provided throughout the school. The overall goals of the initiative were to improve teaching practices; increase student achievement; and better prepare students for work, citizenship,…

Suggests conventional evaluation reports are inappropriate for what needs to be portrayed for software users concerned with acquisition, software adaptation, design and development, and teacher implementation decisions. Two forms for evaluating information are described and illustrated--a narrative portrayal form and a design and development…

Explains human interactive analysis as an architecture for using computer interactive technologies in the analysis of complex work environments. A project at the Naval Training Systems Center that used video-audio data to develop a multimedia database is described; the analysis and management of data are discussed; and decision processes are…

Discusses the role of computer keyboard operators in typesetting complex mathematical expressions used in instructional materials, examines the role of software in producing good quality output, and describes Expressionist, software for Macintosh hardware that can be used with desktop publishing and word processing software to enter mathematical…