September 7, 2018
SLATE has developed a Learning Analytics (LA) Portal as part of the Map LA project. This project responds to part of SLATE’s mandate, which is to carry out a national survey of the status of learning analytics in Norway, including limitations and opportunities.
The Portal is intended to be a community resource informing and supporting all the different LA interest groups in Norway, including public and private academic/research institutions, teaching institutions on all three levels,industry, NGOs, publishers, public service organizations, and government bodies on national, regional and local levels.
It uses LAP, an online, dynamic mind-mapping tool, inspired by wikis, mind maps and social media to facilitate the Norwegian learning analytics community to describe itself. One of the pillars of Norwegian society is the concept of“dugnad” – voluntary participation in an activity for the benefit of a community. Effect mapping of Norway’s LA activity requires a national “dugnad” effort.
Since it was launched in March 2017, dugnad participants have recorded:
Architecture
LAP is constructed as a 3-layered structure, where both the data and business logic are stored as an Oracle database, and the presentation layer is managed by an Apache web server and accessed through a web browser. The end user requires only a supported web browser to use LAP. The latest versions of Microsoft Edge,Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome are supported. The business layer is developed using Oracle Application Express (APEX). The presentation layer is developed using the d3.js (https://d3js.org/) visualisation library, in addition to selected JavaScript libraries.
Functionality
Thereare six main categories of information (Table 1), each with a set ofsubcategories, presented in the tree structure (Figure 1). Each category has apersistent colour, to support understanding of how kinds of information belongtogether when navigating the tree structure. Navigation is carried out byclicking the nodes; clicking a node for a category opens the associatedsubcategories. Clicking these takes the user to the nodes with associatedinformation. Clicking on the same node again, takes the user back to theprevious view. Each node displays a title for the information it contains. It isalso possible to navigate the tree by using the legend presented in the centretop of the screen. Clicking end nodes containing information opens a smallcircle with a context-dependent summary of the information in the bottom leftcorner. Clicking this circle expands it, and more detailed information ispresented, if available. Information can also be viewed as lists, and asselected charts. To add, delete or modify information, users have toregister/log in, and use the editor mode of LAP.
Go to SLATE's MAPLA: http://lap.app.uib.no
