Learning Analytics and the Future of Change in the Classroom
That also goes for data privacy and security. Those are going to be key in the future and where it's headed.
Also, kind of under the under the covers of it all is that integration with digital learning environments. I think AI is going to help us connect these environments. Even today, with all the work that we do as a community to try to promote a connected digital learning environment, sort of a seamless experience so learners can learn, it's still kind of clunky. I mean, not because of the standards that we put in place that are really trying to get it to work together. But there's a lot of effort in going into making that happen and getting people to adopt and getting suppliers to adhere to the standards. I think the key is, though, AI will help us make those integrations more seamless in a way that learners can just learn and faculty can just teach, and they're not going to have to navigate all those technological complexities as they once did and may even end up as you've got your own personal assistant that helps you with some of those menial tasks of the work that you do, freeing you up for more of those higher order thinking parts of your role.
One other area I've heard one of our members talk about: With AI, ChatGPT goes out and crawls the entire web. And some of that content is dubious. I can do the same search on ChatGPT multiple times and get different answers. And it will cite articles that don't even exist or that are not really academic articles. And so some of our members have talked about a future where there are walled gardens of content, basically, that you can leverage with a ChatGPT or other generative AI. So you're basically walling off the content so that you can have trust in the results that you get. So I think it'll be interesting.
But it's exploding, as you know, and I do think that AI is going to help our members accelerate their work with analytics because there are going to be new tools available and new capabilities, so that with the budget limitations they may have, this type of initiative really allows them to move it forward in significant ways without having to tap enormous resources. So we'll see, but I think that that efficiency will play a role.
CT: What would you like to leave us with about 1EdTech?
Deau: I think one of the things that I really value about the work that we're doing is the community. While Notre Dame and I are going to be at Tech Tactics, I think you should be aware that there are many, many other members that work diligently to further this work. Our organization is really about working together to solve problems for members. And in the analytics space, that's a big area of our initiatives. (We have four key initiatives, and analytics is one of them.) So we know our members want data; we want them to be able to make use of the data so that they can really get into solving problems for their students. So we work together to do that.