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My personal view after two weeks: edX – enrolment and discussion forum and the certification of learning via self-assessment (thanks to Matt Crosslin (@grandeped) for the clarification). Course content … seems to be hosted outside edX in a WordPress blog. Visual syllabus … not sure that it adds much but it looks nice. Dual layer MOOC – more confusing than helpful — at least at first. ProSolo – as the prime aggregator for the course it’s flawed; many of the daily digested materials are off-topic because it’s a contributor’s whole blog (and optionally comments) feed that is aggregated rather than posts tagged DALMOOC....

The biggest barrier to exploiting data analytics for teaching and learning at my institution is lack of access to the actual data. The useful stuff that we are required to analyse and reflect on is packaged for us either in PDF reports or as unstructured tables on web pages. Presumably this is done to make our analysis easier, but it also has the effect of aggregating and filtering the data into forms that the University finds useful, or assumes that we will find useful, or perhaps are most useful for national statistics agencies....

View the story “Tony Hirst on Data Wrangling” on Storify

Why can’t the developers of educational platforms create a decent forum? You’d think that there’d be several decades of experience of what works and what doesn’t to call on. However, like most of the (Managed/Virtual) Learning Environments I’ve had to use, and MOOCs that I’ve tried, the edX forum which being used for the Data, Analatics and Learning MOOC (#DALMOOC) is broken. The particular issues that I have are 1) that there’s no mark all items as read button and 2) no way to edit your own posts....

Cloud9 is a cloud-based interactive development environment (IDE) with some killer features. Amongst these is the possibility of creating and hosting a WordPress blog completely free. The blog runs in a Ubuntu instance on Docker and you have complete access to the WordPress’s PHP files using the very capable browser-based IDE. No need for virtual hosting, FTP, or any of that arcane stuff. The IDE provides terminal access to the Docker instance over ssh through the browser and there’s a MySQL database, Git support and built-in support for Bitbucket and GitHub....