Learning Analytics Cookbook

This book offers an introduction and hands-on examples that demonstrate how Learning Analytics (LA) can be used to enhance digital learning, teaching and training at various levels. While the majority of existing literature on the subject focuses on its application at large corporations, this book develops and showcases approaches that bring LA closer to smaller organizations, and to educational institutions that lack sufficient resources to implement a full-fledged LA infrastructure. In closing, the book introduces a set of software tools for data analytics and visualization, and explains how they can be employed in several LA scenarios.

This book A Beginner’s Guide to Learning Analytics is designed to meet modern educational trends’ needs. It is addressed to readers who have no prior knowledge of learning analytics and functions as an introductory text to learning analytics for those who want to do more with evaluation/assessment in their organizations. The book is useful to all who need to evaluate their learning and teaching strategies. It aims to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators. Covered here are the key concepts linked to learning analytics for researchers and practitioners interested in learning analytics. This book helps those who want to apply analytics to learning and development programs and helps educational institutions to identify learners who require support and provide a more personalized learning experience. Like chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to enhance student and faculty performance. It presents a coherent framework for the effective translation of learning analytics research for educational practice to its practical application in different educational domains. This book provides educators and researchers with the tools and frameworks to effectively make sense of and use data and analytics in their everyday practice. This book will be a valuable addition to researchers’ bookshelves.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction by an extraordinary range of experts to the recent and rapidly developing field of learning analytics. Some of the finest current thinkers about ways to interpret and benefit from the increasing amount of evidence from learners’ experiences have taken time to explain their methods, describe examples, and point out new underpinnings for the field. Together, they show how this new field has the potential to dramatically increase learner success through deeper understanding of the academic, social-emotional, motivational, identity and meta-cognitive context each learner uniquely brings. Learning analytics is much more than “analyzing learning data”—it is about deeply understanding what learning activities work well, for whom, and when. Learning Analytics in Education provides an essential framework, as well as guidance and examples, for a wide range of professionals interested in the future of learning. If you are already involved in learning analytics, or otherwise trying to use an increasing density of evidence to understand learners’ progress, these leading thinkers in the field may give you new insights. If you are engaged in teaching at any level, or training future teachers/faculty for this new, increasingly technology-enhanced learning world, and want some sense of the potential opportunities (and pitfalls) of what technology can bring to your teaching and students, these forward-thinking leaders can spark your imagination. If you are involved in research around uses of technology, improving learning measurements, better ways to use evidence to improve learning, or in more deeply understanding human learning itself, you will find additional ideas and insights from some of the best thinkers in the field here. If you are involved in making administrative or policy decisions about learning, you will find new ideas (and dilemmas) coming your way from inevitable changes in how we design and deliver instruction, how we measure the outcomes, and how we provide feedback to students, teachers, developers, administrators, and policy-makers. For all these players, the trick will be to get the most out of all the new developments to efficiently and effectively improve learning performance, without getting distracted by “shiny” technologies that are disconnected from how human learning and development actually work.

"In our increasingly digitally enabled education world, analytics used ethically, strategically, and with care holds the potential to help more and more diverse students be more successful on higher education journeys than ever before. Jay Liebowitz and a cadre of the fields best ‘good trouble’ makers in this space help shine a light on the possibilities, potential challenges, and the power of learning together in this work." —Mark David Milliron, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Executive Dean of the Teachers College, Western Governors University Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftereffects, we have begun to enter the "new normal" of education. Instead of online learning being an "added feature" of K–12 schools and universities worldwide, it will be incorporated as an essential feature in education. There are many questions and concerns from parents, students, teachers, professors, administrators, staff, accrediting bodies, and others regarding the quality of virtual learning and its impact on student learning outcomes. Online Learning Analytics is conceived on trying to answer the questions of those who may be skeptical about online learning. Through better understanding and applying learning analytics, we can assess how successful learning and student/faculty engagement, as examples, can contribute towards producing the educational outcomes needed to advance student learning for future generations. Learning analytics has proven to be successful in many areas, such as the impact of using learning analytics in asynchronous online discussions in higher education. To prepare for a future where online learning plays a major role, this book examines: Data insights for improving curriculum design, teaching practice, and learning Scaling up learning analytics in an evidence-informed way The role of trust in online learning. Online learning faces very real philosophical and operational challenges. This book addresses areas of concern about the future of education and learning. It also energizes the field of learning analytics by presenting research on a range of topics that is broad and recognizes the humanness and depth of educating and learning.

This edited volume fills the gaps in existing literature on visualization and dashboard design for learning analytics. To do so, it presents critical tips to stakeholders and acts as guide to efficient implementation. The book covers the following topics: visualization and dashboard design for learning analytics, visualization and dashboard preferences of stakeholders, learners’ patterns on the dashboard, usability of visualization techniques and the dashboard, dashboard and intervention design, learning and instructional design for learning analytics, privacy and security issues about the dashboard, and future directions of visualization and dashboard design. This book will be of interest to researchers with interest in learning analytics and data analytics, teachers and students in higher education institutions and instructional designers, as it includes contributions from a wide variety of educational and psychological researchers, engineers, instructional designers, learning scientists, and computer scientists interested in learning analytics.

The term learning analytics is used in the context of the use of analytics in e-learning environments. Learning analytics is used to improve quality. It uses data about students and their activities to provide better understanding and to improve student learning. The use of learning management systems, where the activity of the students can be easily accessed, potentiated the use of learning analytics to understand their route during the learning process, help students be aware of their progress, and detect situations where students can give up the course before its completion, which is a growing problem in e-learning environments. Advancing the Power of Learning Analytics and Big Data in Education provides insights concerning the use of learning analytics, the role and impact of analytics on education, and how learning analytics are designed, employed, and assessed. The chapters will discuss factors affecting learning analytics such as human factors, geographical factors, technological factors, and ethical and legal factors. This book is ideal for teachers, administrators, teacher educators, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the use of big data and learning analytics for improved student success and educational environments.

Over 60 practical recipes on data exploration and analysis About This Book Clean dirty data, extract accurate information, and explore the relationships between variables Forecast the output of an electric plant and the water flow of American rivers using pandas, NumPy, Statsmodels, and scikit-learn Find and extract the most important features from your dataset using the most efficient Python libraries Who This Book Is For If you are a beginner or intermediate-level professional who is looking to solve your day-to-day, analytical problems with Python, this book is for you. Even with no prior programming and data analytics experience, you will be able to finish each recipe and learn while doing so. What You Will Learn Read, clean, transform, and store your data usng Pandas and OpenRefine Understand your data and explore the relationships between variables using Pandas and D3.js Explore a variety of techniques to classify and cluster outbound marketing campaign calls data of a bank using Pandas, mlpy, NumPy, and Statsmodels Reduce the dimensionality of your dataset and extract the most important features with pandas, NumPy, and mlpy Predict the output of a power plant with regression models and forecast water flow of American rivers with time series methods using pandas, NumPy, Statsmodels, and scikit-learn Explore social interactions and identify fraudulent activities with graph theory concepts using NetworkX and Gephi Scrape Internet web pages using urlib and BeautifulSoup and get to know natural language processing techniques to classify movies ratings using NLTK Study simulation techniques in an example of a gas station with agent-based modeling In Detail Data analysis is the process of systematically applying statistical and logical techniques to describe and illustrate, condense and recap, and evaluate data. Its importance has been most visible in the sector of information and communication technologies. It is an employee asset in almost all economy sectors. This book provides a rich set of independent recipes that dive into the world of data analytics and modeling using a variety of approaches, tools, and algorithms. You will learn the basics of data handling and modeling, and will build your skills gradually toward more advanced topics such as simulations, raw text processing, social interactions analysis, and more. First, you will learn some easy-to-follow practical techniques on how to read, write, clean, reformat, explore, and understand your data—arguably the most time-consuming (and the most important) tasks for any data scientist. In the second section, different independent recipes delve into intermediate topics such as classification, clustering, predicting, and more. With the help of these easy-to-follow recipes, you will also learn techniques that can easily be expanded to solve other real-life problems such as building recommendation engines or predictive models. In the third section, you will explore more advanced topics: from the field of graph theory through natural language processing, discrete choice modeling to simulations. You will also get to expand your knowledge on identifying fraud origin with the help of a graph, scrape Internet websites, and classify movies based on their reviews. By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently use the vast array of tools that the Python environment has to offer. Style and approach This hands-on recipe guide is divided into three sections that tackle and overcome real-world data modeling problems faced by data analysts/scientist in their everyday work. Each independent recipe is written in an easy-to-follow and step-by-step fashion.

A Cookbook that will help you implement Machine Learning algorithms and techniques by building real-world projects Ê KEY FEATURESÊ Learn how to handle an entire Machine Learning Pipeline supported with adequate mathematics. Create Predictive Models and choose the right model for various types of Datasets. Learn the art of tuning a model to improve accuracy as per Business requirements. Get familiar with concepts related to Data Analytics with Visualization, Data Science and Machine Learning. DESCRIPTION Machine Learning does not have to be intimidating at all. This book focuses on the concepts of Machine Learning and Data Analytics with mathematical explanations and programming examples. All the codes are written in Python as it is one of the most popular programming languages used for Data Science and Machine Learning. Here I have leveraged multiple libraries like NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, etc. to ease our task and not reinvent the wheel. There are five projects in total, each addressing a unique problem. With the recipes in this cookbook, one will learn how to solve Machine Learning problems for real-time data and perform Data Analysis and Analytics, Classification, and beyond. The datasets used are also unique and will help one to think, understand the problem and proceed towards the goal. The book is not saturated with Mathematics, but mostly all the Mathematical concepts are covered for the important topics. Every chapter typically starts with some theory and prerequisites, and then it gradually dives into the implementation of the same concept using Python, keeping a project in the background.Ê Ê WHAT WILL YOU LEARN Understand the working of the O.S.E.M.N. framework in Data Science.Ê Get familiar with the end-to-end implementation of Machine Learning Pipeline. Learn how to implement Machine Learning algorithms and concepts using Python. Learn how to build a Predictive Model for a Business case. WHO THIS BOOK IS FORÊ This cookbook is meant for anybody who is passionate enough to get into the World of Machine Learning and has a preliminary understanding of the Basics of Linear Algebra, Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. This book also serves as a reference guidebook for intermediate Machine Learning practitioners. Ê TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Boston Crime 2. World Happiness Report 3. Iris Species 4. Credit Card Fraud Detection 5. Heart Disease UCI