In spring 2020, nearly all school districts across the nation transitioned to virtual education during extended school closures caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. K-12 education agencies pivoted to virtual education in a short amount of time with limited options available for developing a virtual education program. This…

The need for a comprehensive education data governance -- the regulation of who collects what data, how it is used and why -- continues to grow. Technologically, data can be collected by third parties, rendering schools unable to control their use. Legal frameworks partially achieve data governance as businesses continue to exploit existing…

The educational setting has been the backdrop for numerous debates as far back as recorded history. Today's educational setting, however, contains technological elements so advanced that they by their very nature bring with them a series of highly significant implications which educators have never before been required to address. These issues…

Learning analytics involve the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, in order to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs. Since emerging as a distinct field in 2011, learning analytics has grown rapidly, and early adopters around the world are developing and…

Although widely used, the SCORM metadata model for content aggregation is difficult to be used by educators, content developers and instructional designers. Particularly, the identification of contents related with each other, in large repositories, and their aggregation using metadata as defined in SCORM, has been demanding efforts of computer…

Over the past 20 years, many colleges and universities have made significant progress in building data warehouses and implementing business intelligence tools to provide better access to administrative data that were previously locked away in enterprise systems. However, the data architectures from the 1990s and 2000s are aging as new technologies…

While many strategies for protecting personal privacy rely on regulatory frameworks, consent, and anonymizing data, they are not always effective. Terms and Conditions often lag behind advances in technology, software, and user behaviours, and consent to use data for a range of unclear purposes may be provided unwittingly. As the commercial market…

If only we could know what our students were up to at any given moment in class. Who is paying attention, and who is falling asleep? Who understands the past perfect and who thinks it is about something wonderful that happened yesterday? And wouldn't it be great if we knew who is motivated and who is ready to drop out of the course? Language…

This article describes the development of an application for the grading and provision of feedback on educational processes. The too, named "EduZinc," enables instructors to go through the complete process of creating and evaluating the activities and materials of a course. The application enables for the simultaneous management of two…

This case involves actual data from a student managed café that serves as a learning laboratory for a college of business. The student team that manages the café has never had access to precise data from a point of sale system until this semester. However, once they downloaded the raw data from the cash register they were unable to make sense of…

This working paper identifies OECD countries' interests in digital innovation in education by analysing their policy papers on digital education. Many OECD countries have adopted a specific strategy on digital education, or integrated the topic in a generic strategy on digital innovation as such. The ideas that are expressed in the strategies…

This paper details the anticipated impact of synthetic "big" data on learning analytics (LA) infrastructures, with a particular focus on data governance, the acceleration of service development, and the benchmarking of predictive models. By reviewing two cases, one at the sector-wide level (the Jisc learning analytics architecture) and…

The "big data revolution" has penetrated many fields, from network monitoring to online retail. Education and learning are quickly becoming part of it, too, because today, course delivery platforms can collect unprecedented amounts of behavioral data about students as they interact with learning content online. This data includes, for…

With the increased capability of learning analytics in higher education, more institutions are developing or implementing student dashboards. Despite the emergence of dashboards as an easy way to present data to students, students have had limited involvement in the dashboard development process. As part of a larger program of research examining…

The inclusion of age-appropriate transition assessments is a key component of transition services for students with disabilities. Although these assessments may focus on a variety of areas, their general purpose is to provide guidance in developing individualized postschool goals and design transition services to help students achieve these goals.…