Learning Analytics

Video is the most convenient format in education. It is also one of the laziest. A lecture video can be paused, replayed, accelerated, clipped, embedded, and repackaged into a course library with very little friction. Wonderful. The learner still sits there, mostly alone, while the platform pretends that a progress bar is a learning signal. Add a quiz at the end and suddenly we call it “interactive.” Education technology has always had a generous imagination. ...

Pulse is a tempting number. Put two people in a high-pressure task, strap a wearable to each wrist, measure how their bodies move together, and it becomes very easy to tell a neat story: synchronized teams are aligned teams; aligned teams perform better; therefore, AI should monitor physiological synchrony and intervene when people fall out of sync. ...

Examples are where learning either lands or dies. A student can read a clean definition of machine learning, nod politely, and still have no usable mental picture. A manager can ask an AI tutor for “a simpler explanation,” receive the same abstraction with softer adjectives, and remain exactly as confused as before. This is one of the less glamorous failures of AI education: the model can explain almost anything, but often explains it to no one in particular. ...