Abstract:

We will present the preliminary results of an investigation on the use of a variety of learning tools loosely integrated by the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) of the Up2U EU-funded project.

Students perform individual and group activities, both formal and informal ones, within a project of fixed duration, to accomplish a common task established by a teacher or chosen by the learners on their own initiative.

Learning-related data are fed to a central store by a popular LMS, by a collaborative platform supporting project-oriented and artifact-oriented learning and by simpler tools able to track a set of less structured activities.

Data are then processed with different tools to analyze meaningful correlations between activities mediated by different tools and are finally compared to information acquired in more traditional ways about some skill levels, before and after the project execution.

The investigation puts a special focus on actions related to the set-up and the coordination of a project group and on the activity aimed at finding educational resources on the web.

The tools in the NGDLE use the xAPI protocol to send statements of user actions. A commons Learning Record Store (LRS) is provided by the NGDLE itself. Processing of analytics data is performed both with native functions of the LRS and with external tools being fed with exported data.

Keywords:

Formal and informal learning, learning analytics, learning with a variety of tools, project-oriented learning, artifact-oriented learning.