Making sense of learner and learning Big Data: reviewing five years of Data Wrangling at the Open University UK

Most distance learning institutions collect vast amounts of learning data. Making sense of this ‘Big Data’ can be a challenge, in particular when data are stored at different data warehouses and require advanced statistical skills to interpret complex patterns of data. As a leading institute on learning analytics, the Open University UK instigated in 2012 a Data Wrangling initiative. This provided every Faculty with a dedicated academic with expertise data analysis and whose task is to provide strategic, pedagogical and sense-making advice to staff and senior management. Given substantial changes within the OU (e.g. new Faculty structure, real-time dashboards, two large-scale adoptions of predictive analytics approaches, increased reliance on analytics), this embedded case study provides an in-depth review of lessons learned of five years of data wrangling. We will elaborate on the design of the new structure, its strengths and potential weaknesses, and affordances to be adopted by other institutions.     

关于基础教学的改革与设想

在市场经济高速发展的今天,各行各业都将围绕一个中心,即改革与创新。作为培养人材的高校,也必须做出相应调整和创新,就目前基础教育的现状及存在的问题,提出基础教育改革的设想,为探索基础教育发展的新思路提供参考。     

论高等教育与基础教育的衔接

教育是一个系统工程,基础教育和高等教育是这一系统工程中相互联系、相互制约的两个重要组成部分,高等教育与基础教育的衔接问题应当受到重视。     

智能化时代学科评价的工具探索

学科评价是高等教育评价的重要内容,是高校学科建设的重要组成部分。在智能化时代,利用人工智能、大数据技术对学科数据进行深度挖掘和科学分析,可以将学科评价从基于小样本或不完整信息的评价转化为基于整体信息的多元化科学化评价。本文通过应用聚类、神经网络分析、关联规则分析等数据挖掘方法对学科数据进行建模分析的思考,对智能化时代高校学科评价进行探索。     

Human rights education and religious education: from mutual suspicion to elective affinity

What are the prospects for joining religious education and human rights education? (1) Human rights educators may cite good historical and philosophical reasons for teaching about human rights without making any reference whatsoever to a religious foundation. (2) For their part, many religious communities have resisted opportunities to form alliances with human rights organisations, citing one form or another of ‘incommensurability’ between their faith and rights. (3) However, there also appear to be some occasions and some projects in which these two communities of discourse can embrace each other, and work for similar goals. How can we come to a better understanding about these regions of ‘elective affinity’ and their implications for religious education and human rights education?     

Human rights within education: assessing the justifications

While respect for human rights has long been endorsed as a goal of education, only recently has significant attention been paid to the need to incorporate rights within educational processes. Current support for human rights within education, however, has a variety of motivations. This paper provides a theoretical exploration of these diverse justifications, leading to a normative proposal. A distinction is made between status-based and instrumental approaches. Human rights within education can be justified from a status-based perspective on the basis of their indivisibility, meaning that the right to education must not entail an infringement of other rights. Yet while rights-respecting environments are important sites of learning, instrumental justifications can be a source of concern, if the goals in question are irrelevant or inimical to the enhancement of rights. An argument, therefore, is put forward for a simultaneous realisation of embodiment of and opportunity for learning about human rights.     

Affect and counter-conduct: cultivating action for social change in human rights education

This paper explores the entanglement between two partially connected concerns that offer the potential to animate current discussions on human rights teaching and learning: ‘affect’ and ‘counter-conduct’. Both terms are at the heart of human rights education (HRE) approaches that aim at cultivating resistance in children and youth so that they respond in critically affective and action-oriented ways to human rights violations and social injustices in ‘the everyday’. These concepts are used to explore: first, how to encourage children and youth to enact forms of counter-conduct that are critical in human rights struggles, rather than responses which are sedimented through the governing technologies of declarational approaches of HRE; and second, how these counter-conduct practices may constitute ethical and political practices that critique liberal and sentimental forms of affect about human rights violations. It is argued that theoretical insights that pay attention to counter-conduct and affect offer possibilities for reconsidering normalized ideas in HRE.     

Data entry: towards the critical study of digital data and education

The generation and processing of data through digital technologies is an integral element of contemporary society, as reflected in recent debates over online data privacy, ‘Big Data’ and the rise of data mining and analytics in business, science and government. This paper outlines the significance of digital data within education, arguing for increased interest in the topic from educational researchers. Building on themes from the emerging sub-field of ‘digital sociology’, the paper outlines a number of ways in which digital data in education could be questioned along social lines. These include issues of data inequalities, the role of data in managerialist modes of organisation and control, the rise of so-called ‘dataveillance' and the reductionist nature of data-based representation. The paper concludes with a set of suggestions for future research and discussion, thus outlining the beginnings of a framework for the future critical study of digital data and education.     

学生的权利及其保护

学生的权利是教育法的一项重要内容。在教育法律关系中,作为主体的学生享有教育法律法规规定的广泛的权利,但由于传统的学生权利观的影响,某些学校、教师、家长法律意识淡薄,有意或无意地侵犯学生的合法权益,使学生身心受到损害,以至于师生、校生对薄公堂,学校、教师成为被告。为了扭转这种局面。社会各界,特别是学校管理人员、教师必须正确认识学生的权利,依法履行好维护和保障学生权利的职责。     

Between a rock and a hard place: decolonising religious and human rights education

ABSTRACT

Human rights education and Islamic education are typically presented as finished products without room for critique that do not always align with local and personal realities, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes called ‘decoupling’. To examine the ways in which decoupling might occur in one setting, this proposed article reports on the results of a quantitative study that analysed the responses of 470 education students at a university in Kuwait who were asked to rate on a 4-point scale their level of agreement with statements of women’s rights in general terms and in specific situations. Mean differences in their responses to women’s rights in general were compared to their responses to women’s rights, in particular, using a one-sample t-test, along with comparisons of demographic differences in responses analysed using ANOVA. The results showed that the students agreed with women’s rights in general but there was significantly less agreement with women’s rights in particular, suggesting that even on an individual level, a decoupling effect takes place when translating universalised value systems, like human rights and religion, to local realities.     

Learning analytics: challenges and limitations

Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics – both data and algorithms – are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about learning and learners – and indeed the tendency not to theorize learning explicitly – that underpin such implementations. Finally, we describe an attempt to devise our own analytics, grounded in a sociomaterial conception of learning. We use the data obtained to suggest that the relationships between learning and the digital traces left by participants in online learning are far from trivial, and that any analytics that relies on these as proxies for learning tends towards a behaviorist evaluation of learning processes.     

The quest for cognitive justice: towards a pluriversal human rights education

This paper turns to the work of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and explores how a set of concepts he developed over the years may constitute valuable tools in the task of decolonising and pluriversalising Human Rights Education (HRE). Informed by decolonial theory, Santos highlights that the struggle for global social justice is inseparable from the struggle for cognitive justice, namely, the recognition of epistemic diversity. This paper makes a contribution to the efforts that view the pluriversalisation of HRE as inextricable parts of the wider task of decolonising knowledge and education and struggling for social justice.     

Rights-based education and conflict: a cross-national study of rights discourse in textbooks

This paper investigates the extent to which rights-based education is utilised in textbooks from conflict-affected countries. Drawing on a unique dataset of 528 secondary social science textbooks from 71 countries from 1966 to 2008, we analyse factors that predict a rights discourse in texts. We find that textbooks from conflict-affected nations are significantly less likely to emphasise a rights-based discourse, while more recently published textbooks from more democratic countries are more likely to emphasise a rights discourse. Our findings have ramifications for curricular reform and rights-based education in conflict-affected nations.     

基础教育校本课程开发刍议

虽然我国在基础教育中推行了“国家课程”、“地方课程”、“校本课程”三级课程管理体制，但校本课程开发仍很薄弱。究其原因，人们对校本课程实施意义的认识不到位，对校本课程开发的基点把握不准是重要方面。必须高度重视校本课程的开发，把我国基础教育课程改革引向深入。     

Human rights,cosmopolitanism and utopias: implications for citizenship education

Citizenship education, defined as learning to live together, requires agreement on certain common principles. One central purpose of a state education system is the transmission of common normative standards such as the human rights and fundamental freedoms that underpin liberal democratic societies. The paper identifies the conceptual roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the sociological concept of utopia and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. In the UDHR, the vision of freedoms that may promote human flourishing provides a precise way of conceptualising limits on state power. Whilst human rights is not a general theory, the concept has the hugely beneficial property of enabling people whose value systems are diverse and apparently incompatible, nonetheless to recognise and accept common standards and principles that make living in society possible. The implications of this are that human rights education is rightfully recognised as an essential component of citizenship education.     

Critical literacy: an approach to child rights education in Uganda and Canada

For children to know how to fully participate in and most effectively lead the world they will inherit, they must learn how to critically engage with it and be knowledgeable about foundational rights and instruments that support such engagement. Together, critical literacy, which encourages the examination and interrogation of the underlying assumptions of dominant narratives and ‘legitimate’ knowledge, and children's rights education, which involves children in learning how to express their ideas and fully participate in society (as appropriate to their age and ability), offer a powerful approach—theoretical and pedagogical—to engage children in active engagement of the world, especially with respect to the promotion of social justice. However, the layers of complexity and risks associated with deep consideration of challenging topics require expert guidance and compassionate role modelling from teachers of young children. Our paper considers the intersections between critical literacy and global child rights with reference to a study conducted with young school children in Canada and Uganda to discuss how teachers can support meaningful learning experiences in the classroom that can promote children's agency and social justice commitments.     

Socialisation and citizenship preparation in vocational education: Pedagogic codes and democratic rights in VET-subjects

ABSTRACT

Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is likely a significant part of the citizenship preparation that occurs in vocational programmes. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein and ethnographic data, this study presents an analysis of socialisation processes in vocational elements of three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis addresses the formation of pedagogic codes in various vocational programmes and subjects, and how these codes condition students’ practice of citizenship at individual, social and political levels. The results show how different pedagogic codes have different implications for the students’ practice of citizenship, and thus raise questions about factors and processes that may either constrain or strengthen, this aspect in vocational subject classes.     

Changing spaces of education: new perspectives on the nature of learning

This case study relates to distance learning students on open access courses. It demonstrates the use of predictive analytics to generate a model of the probabilities of success and retention at different points, or milestones, in a student journey. A core set of explanatory variables has been established and their varying relative importance at different milestones identified. The explanatory variables, milestones and reference points when the model is run will be different at other institutions but the approach may be generalised to distance learning institutions and, more broadly, to any HE institution. Institutions, and especially distance education institutions which do not have the advantages of frequently seeing students, need to make full use of any recorded information they hold to try and identify students who are, or become, at potential risk of leaving. The importance of different factors, at different milestones, may help tailor student support to individual students and therefore improve low retention in open access distance education.     

Producing neoliberal citizens: critical reflections on human rights education in Pakistan

This paper challenges the celebratory uptake of human rights education (HRE) in postcolonial contexts by making visible the ideological and political entanglements of the discourse with neoliberal assumptions of citizenship. I draw evidence from, and critically reflect on, a specific HRE programme – a series of summer camps for girls entitled, Women Leaders of Tomorrow (WLT) – that a colleague and I implemented in Pakistan. Using narrative inquiry methodology, I examine the kinds of citizens imagined in and through its curriculum, and the norms of leadership and community promoted by it, to argue that the programme can be interpreted as a technology of neoliberalism in that it was productive of neoliberal rationalities. Individuals, however, are not simply objects of knowledges; they co-opt, resist, negotiate, and compromise. I, thus, disturb my own linear reading of the unfolding of WLT by reflecting on moments of resistances where participants not only interrogated its assumptions but also engaged in self-stylisations that produced new mutations of HRE. This unfolding of a globalist discourse in a local setting directs me to call for a re-conceptualisation of HRE in postcolonial contexts that is multiple, contingent, and fluid.     

Young children's enactments of human rights in early childhood education

This paper explores ways in which human rights become part of and affect young children's everyday practices in early childhood education and, more particularly, how very young children enact human rights in the preschool setting. The study is conducted in a Swedish preschool through observations of the everyday practices of a group of children aged between 1 and 3 years. With a child view based on human rights theory and childhood sociology, an action-based methodology for seeking children's perspective is used to analyse the observation data. Three rights areas are identified in which children frequently deal with human rights in their actions and where they enact a range of possible rights holder positions: ownership, influence and equal value. These rights areas, and the children's various enactments of the rights, are reflected against the preschool context as a co-constructor to the actions of the participants.