[nl]

Interesting.

There's a whole emerging field called "learning analytics", which at the moment appears to be more a theoretically good idea than anything with practical outcomes (Sadly, much in education is like this - something will emerge in the technology field, and then 6 months later there will be a XXX-in-education movement) - although Khan Academy is in a good position to get that data and use it.

But for those of you who have kids who do Kumon Math (or similar) it's pretty easy to see how analytics could speed up the Kumon process (of selecting questions that exercise very specific skills).

For those interested there is an upcoming "Big Data in Education" Coursera course[1] that I'm planning on doing. It will be my first coursea experience, so I'm not quite sure what to expect. I'm in the fortunate position of having access to a fairly significant amount of educational usage data, so I'm hoping it will be useful.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/bigdata-edu

[ZeroGravitas]

Only 6 months later? I'd pegged it around 3-5 years.

Your Kumon math suggestion is exactly what Khan academy are doing as their first big usage of this stuff. See the links I posted elsewhere for more info from them.

I think the big difference is that Khan Academy is building their whole approach around the analytics, rather than vice versa. There's plenty of "free" info you can collect from web or online courses or question banks, but I've not seen any real concept for feeding that back into the course construction.

For example, at one "learning analytics" thing I attended it was discovered that the really big indicator of whether a student was going to pass or fail was whether they did well on exams. This fact though was buried so deep behind a super simple traffic light dashboard that no user would have ever been able to figure it out and do something useful with that info, like for example change the course to have more and earlier testing, which is easier than ever with modern technology.

For whatever reason, just testing student's knowledge isn't considered quite as exciting as trying to predict their success by applying dizzyingly complex math to the trail they leave on the web.

[grovulent]

The quality of a course really depends on who is running it and how enthusiastic they are. So I would recommend keeping an open mind about coursera until you've taken a few different courses.

Also depends on the students that take it. Sometimes you get incredibly helpful people taking the course - that seem to know everything and beyond - and don't mind taking the time giving really detailed explanations on the forums.

I'm doing the calculus course atm - and enjoying it a lot.