Regular readers will be aware of my ambivalence about MOOCs – I don’t see them as the avalanche that will totally transform or disrupt higher education, although I can recognise there are some useful things we can learn from them.

They do however provide a great opportunity for self-directed personal learning and development, with no financial cost – but a significant time commitment.

The recent NMC Horizon report identified that Learning Analytics will be a key development in the coming years, hence I am now enroled for Coursera’s new course on Big Data in Education which starts in August and runs for 10 weeks.

Through this I’ll be studying:

• Prediction Modeling
• Behavior Detection
• Behavior Detector Validation
• Relationship Mining
• Discovery with Models
• Visualization of Educational Data
• Knowledge Inference
• Structure Discovery: Knowledge Structures
• Structure Discovery: Clustering and Factor Analysis
• Educational Databases

Come and join me!