Learning Analytics: Utopia or Dystopia
by Professor Paul A. Kirschner
Thursday April 28, 2016
Learning Analytics (LA) is being greeted with the same adoration, praise, and/or joy (hosanna!) as we saw with many other information-technological innovations of the past few decades. There is, however, both a positive and a negative difference between LA and earlier innovations. First the good news. LA is probably the first in the long line of innovations and promises based upon them that can possibly achieve many of the educational futures that people are hoping for such as adaptivity, differentiation, tailor-made instruction, and so forth. And now the bad news. While most of the others failed and in their failure were innocuous (if you consider wasting time and money to be innocuous), LA has the potential to also do harm in a number of ways. This keynote will try to put both the possible utopian futures and their dystopian counterparts on the research and praxis agendas.
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