Design4learning conference

At the end of November I was at a different sort of conference to the ones I normally get to attend.  This one, Design4learning was held at the OU in Milton Keynes, but was a more general education conference.  Described as “The Conference aims to advance the understanding and application of blended learning, design4learning and learning analytics ” Design4learning covered topics such as MOOCs, elearning, learning design and learning analytics.

There were a useful series of presentations at the conference and several of them are available from the conference website.   We’d put together a poster for the conference talking about the work we’ve started to do in the library on ‘library analytics’ – entitled ‘Learning Analytics – exploring the value of library data and it was good to talk to a few non-library people about the wealth of data that libraries capture and how that can contribute to the institutional picture of learning analytics.

Our poster covered some of the exploration that we’ve been doing, mainly with online resource usage from our EZProxy logfiles.  In some cases we’ve been able to join that data with demographic and other data from surveys to start to look in a very small way at patterns of online library use.

Design4learning conference poster v3

The poster also highlighted the range of data that libraries capture and the sorts of questions that could be asked and potentially answered.  It also flagged up the leading-edge work by projects such as Huddersfield’s Library Impact Data Project and the work of the Jisc Lamp project.

An interesting conference and an opportunity to talk with a different group of people about the potential of library data.