Strategies for Data and Learning Analytics Informed National Education Policies: the Case of Uruguay

Abstract

This work provides an overview of an education and technology monitoring system developed at Plan Ceibal, a nationwide initiative created to enable technology enhanced learning in Uruguay. Plan Ceibal currently offers one-to-one access to technology and connectivity to every student and teacher (from primary and secondary education) as well as a comprehensive set of educational software platforms. All these resources generate massive amounts of data about the progress and style of students learning. This work introduces the conceptual framework, design and preliminary results of the Big Data Center for learning analytics currently being developed at Plan Ceibal. This initiative is focused on exploiting these datasets and conducting advanced analytics to support the educational system. To this aim, a 360 degrees profile will be built including information characterizing the user’s online behavior as well as a set of technology enhanced learning factors. These profiles will be studied both at user (e.g., student or teacher) and larger scale levels (e.g., per school or school system), addressing both the need of understanding how technology is being used for learning as well as to provide accurate feedback to support evidence based educational policies.