SoLAR Nexus - Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR)

Nexus? As the name signals, this is meant to bring people together from across the diverse community interested in these questions — including educators, learning technologists, instructional designers, researchers, data scientists, user interface designers, educational leaders — hey, even students who are curious to know how these systems come into being!

Nexus is published on Medium at solarnexus.medium.com to take advantage of that huge community, but also mirrored here since Medium limits non-members to 3 articles/month. So if you’re not signed up there, you can still read to your heart’s content here!

Enjoy the stories. Like/dislike what you see? Want to share your work? You’re warmly invited to email the editors with your ideas and feedback: solarnexusblog {at} gmail dot com

Beyond Threaded Discussions: Learning with Knowledge Building Analytics

Chats and threaded forums dominate how we run online discussions in education. But the quality varies widely and it’s impossible for teachers to tell at a glance if learning is going on. In this article, we introduce new kinds of learning analytics that support Knowledge Building discourse… →

AcaWriter: designing automated feedback on writing that teachers and students trust

We know feedback is of paramount importance to help students learn to write and improve their writing skills, but providing good formative feedback is a lot of work for educators. In this blog post, I’ll share what we’re learning about the effective use of automated feedback tools in teaching… →

Welcome to NEXUS: A learning analytics blog!

It’s a pleasure to welcome you to Nexus, the new blog from SoLAR — The Society for Learning Analytics Research!.. →

A Learning Engineer’s Angle on Learning Analytics

“As new educational technologies are developed, how do we know they are working? Where does the science of learning fit into design and data analysis?”.. →

How data presentation can help (or hurt) student motivation

“Designed well, dashboards help students succeed academically. Dashboards can also, however, unintentionally undermine students’ academic motivation. This is potentially disastrous, because before learning happens, students must be motivated to learn…”.. →

Designing dashboards to help students take action

“It was expected by some that once learners had access to learning dashboards, their learning performance would skyrocket. An easy win, right? Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case.”.. →

SoLAR Blogs

Nexus, is just the latest channel to join our podcasts and webinars, as we get the word out about Learning Analytics to our diverse audiences.

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