What are Practical, Meaningful, and Actionable Ways for HR Professionals to Gain Business Experience and Acumen so that they can Truly Make an Impact as Business Partners?

CEOs overwhelmingly report that human capital is one of the leading growth enablers in the modern business world. Thus, in order to meet business goals, senior executives are increasingly holding HR departments accountable for delivering human capital results that are aligned to business strategy. However, as of 2014, 42% of non-HR business leaders believed that their HR teams were “underperforming” or “just getting by.” In agreement, less than 8% of HR leaders believed that their teams had the necessary skills to deliver the results that their counterparts were seeking. The perceived “unreadiness” of HR among business leaders is not only a U.S. phenomenon, but a global one as well. Executives in Japan, Germany, the UK, and China all recognize the problem, but doubt their company’s ability to respond (Appendix 1).11 For companies to effectively address this skills gap they must understand the causes behind the issue. They can then tackle the problem through two general avenues: 1. Adapting organizational design arrangements to better enable HR to work more closely with the business, and 2. Implementing traditional and nontraditional education/training initiatives

Using learning analytics to understand esports students

Electronic sports (esports) has advanced to become a media giant and an arena for competitions and career development. Due to this growth, more focus has been given to esports research, implementation of esports throughout the world, and development of esports curriculum. Introducing esports into schools has created huge opportunities for deeper analysis of esport and learning data to provide insight into the learning processes. By applying learning analytics methods, this research analyzes data that originate from students (N=149) in Swedish high schools. The data was divided between activity data and performance data. The analysis is guided by the learning theory concept self-regulation to analyze differences between user groups. Through exploratory analysis, multiple user groups were identified and then compared in their trends and results to measure the impact of self-regulated learning concepts. Furthermore, the student data was used in the design of a mid-fidelity prototype for a student-facing dashboard to provide feedback and recommendations. Findings reveal that concepts of self-regulated learning have a positive impact in terms of higher curriculum interaction, and also higher performance results in game matches. While the research finds that focus on features promoting self-regulated learning concepts is important, it is challenging to generalize the findings to recommend actions such as suggested session lengths. Future work should include a larger population sample and focus on the implementation of a student-facing dashboard tool to test its reception and usage.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF

Open Universities: the next phase

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to report on research on the views of Presidents and Vice Chancellors of Open Universities of current threats and opportunities for their institutions as the author approaches the 50th anniversary of the first Open University in the UK in 1969. The paper offers a historical account of the development of the Open University model, and assesses the extent to which it remains in the key position as owner of innovation in the higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach - Interviews were conducted with leaders of Open Universities or distance teaching universities. They covered a total of 14 universities. Findings - The replies from institutional leaders reveal the current developments, opportunities and strategic challenges of the universities. It is suggested that the digital revolution along with a wider range of environmental changes for higher education have substantially eroded the first-mover advantage that Open Universities had undoubtedly enjoyed in the first 25 years. Originality/value - The paper concludes that there are significant concerns that innovation in Open Universities is not sufficiently embedded to ensure that their contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be maximised, or even in some cases their survival, and that a key but undervalued element is leadership development for innovation and change

Institutional Analytics: A Response to the Pressures of Academic Capitalism

The higher education sector today faces an environment unlike any it has seen before. Serving a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders and facing diverse and fast-changing economic, social, and political pressures, universities can benefit from corporate-like approaches such as the use of analytics to inform strategic decision-making and planning. Institutional analytics programs can be a valuable resource in guiding university responses to modern challenges around fiscal responsibility, accountability, competition, and student success. Customizable when it comes to leadership, staffing, and data and technology infrastructure, analytics initiatives can be targeted to meet individual institutional resources, environments, challenges, needs, mission, and values. One such resource available at most institutions is Institutional Research (IR), a field that has undergone regular evolution to meet the changing needs of postsecondary education. The unique combination of technical, analytical, and interpersonal roles and skills needed for the effective use of data and analytics can often be met through the engagement of Institutional Research leaders and staff in these initiatives, and they are frequently key participants in the support and delivery of analytics efforts on campus. With Institutional Research as a resource, and flexibility in creating an analytics program that best meet the needs of individual institutions, analytics can serve as a powerful and effective tool for universities responding to todays’ pressures of academic capitalism

Quantified Self Analytics Tools for Self-regulated Learning with myPAL

One of the major challenges in higher education is developing self-regulation skills for lifelong learning. We address this challenge within the myPAL project, in medical education context, utilising the vast amount of student assessment and feedback data collected throughout the programme. The underlying principle of myPAL is Quantified Self -- the use of personal data to enable students to become lifelong learners. myPAL is facilitating this with learning analytics combined with interactive nudges. This paper reviews the state of the art in Quantified Self analytics tools to identify what approaches can be adopted in myPAL and what gaps require further research. The paper contributes to awareness and reflection in technology-enhanced learning by: (i) identifying requirements for intelligent personal adaptive learning systems that foster self-regulation (using myPAL as an example); (ii) analysing the state of the art in text analytics and visualisation related to Quantified Self for self-regulated learning; and (iii) identifying open issues and suggesting possible ways to address them

Ethical considerations in using student data in an era of ‘big data’

Learning with technology enables the collection of data on students at a level unprecedented in face-to-face tuition and paper-based academic administration. Universities see the advantage in tracking students’ engagement and progress, particularly when it comes to putting interventions in place for at-risk students. Our use of these data should be legal, ethical and seen as fair use by students. At no time should it cross the boundaries into the realm of ‘creepy’, a word used by Gartner analyst Frank Buytendijk in several of his presentations at the Gartner ITExpo in Cape Town in September 2014.Universities South Afric

Digital communities: context for leading learning into the future?

In 2011, a robust, on-campus, three-element Community of Practice model consisting of growing community, sharing of practice and building domain knowledge was piloted in a digital learning environment. An interim evaluation of the pilot study revealed that the three-element framework, when used in a digital environment, required a fourth element. This element, which appears to happen incidentally in the face-to-face context, is that of reflecting, reporting and revising. This paper outlines the extension of the pilot study to the national tertiary education context in order to explore the implications for the design, leadership roles, and selection of appropriate technologies to support and sustain digital communities using the four-element model

Why Feedback Literacy Matters for Learning Analytics

Learning analytics (LA) provides data-driven feedback that aims to improve learning and inform action. For learners, LA-based feedback may scaffold self-regulated learning skills, which are crucial to learning success. For teachers, LA-based feedback may help the evaluation of teaching effects and the need for interventions. However, the current development of LA has presented problems related to the cognitive, social-affective, and structural dimensions of feedback. In light of this, this position paper argues that attention needs to shift from the design of LA as a feedback product to one that facilitates a process in which both teachers and students play active roles in meaning-making. To this end, implications for feedback literacy in the context of LA are discussed.Comment: 8 pages. Accepted at the 2022 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). https://2022.isls.org/proceedings

Improving Academic Decision-Making through Course Evaluation Technology

The objective of this study is to offer a broad understanding of how end of course evaluations can be used to improve the academic outcomes of a higher education institute. This paper presents the key findings from a study conducted using twenty-three academic degree-programs, regarding their use of end of course evaluation technology. Data was collected from an online survey instrument, in-depth interviews with academic administrators, and two case studies, one in the US and another in the UAE. The study reveals that while historically end of course evaluations were primarily used to gauge the performance of instructors in the classroom, there are several new trends in the use of end of course evaluations that can help higher education institutions improve academic assessment, teaching and learning, and academic administration decision making. Those trends include sectioning and categorization; questions standardization and benchmarking; alignment with key performance indicators and key learning outcomes; and grouping by course, program outcome, program, college, etc. in addition to those vertical structures, higher education institutions are vertically examining a specific question(s) across. End of course evaluations are now poised as an integral tool and a key health indicators of academic programs