[analytics] Participating in Learning and Knowledge Analytics open course

I'm following the example of Hans de Zwart, and enrolled in George Siemen's open course on Learning and Knowledge Analytics. This open course, based on connectivism principles, has already a few hundreds of participants, and place for many more if you wish to join. It will run over the next weeks. I just watched the replay of the orientation session. (while sitting on my home workout bike, because what is a brand new year without the usual good intentions?). The open course uses various tools such as Moodle, Netvibes, Google Groups, Illuminate, etc all centered around the site:

www.learninganalytics.net

I've been meaning to get familiar with business intelligence and analytics applied to learning and development, but there were always reasons to postpone that. So I'm glad this course triggers a starting point on my journey to discover the good, bad and ugly of the topic. Why the interest? It aligns very much with my employer's (IBM) vision (and that of others in the industry). We at IBM call it 'smarter planet'. It basically says that in a world that is totally instrumented with IT devices, and that is interconnecting all these sources of data, there are more intelligent ways available now to "make the world a better place" (excuse me the marketing language.) I do believe analytics has the potential to become one of the next big things in learning and development.

If my Microsoft Certified System Engineer, book writing (homo competens), and web 2.0 interests are any indication, I'll be sucking in lots of information from all sources I can get in the first time, before I start to make up my mind and contribute to the conversation. I've written it before: I'm a chicken. I pick up a lot of points, before I can 'lay my egg'.

My own interests and learning points are:

• NOT the tools. If I want that, I just talk to our software guys. I've got access to all the information and experts on Cognos and associated business intelligence tools. But the tools come after I've figured out what good they would bring to the table, let us not get things upside down.
• WHAT scenarios are there for analytics to make corporate learning better? I've seen some samples already, and I can imagine better (proactive) matching of learning needs with content and experts, better personalized learning processes, and better evidence gathering of learning impact. But I really want to start dreaming of what is possible with this.
• I'm also concerned about privacy issues (don't be evil), security, and the fact that most people can't handle the truth, as revealed by data.

I'll update you all via my blog on my proceedings in my quest to understand the beauty of analytics for corporate learning.