Publikationen

Despite the ubiquity of learning in workplace and professional settings, the learning analytics (LA) community has paid significant attention to such settings only recently. This may be due to the focus on researching formal learning, as workplace learning is often informal, hard to grasp and not unequivocally defined. This paper summarizes the state of the art of Workplace Learning Analytics (WPLA), extracted from a two-iteration systematic literature review. Our in-depth analysis of 52 existing proposals not only provides a descriptive view of the field, but also reflects on researcher conceptions of learning and their influence on the design, analytics and technology choices made in this area. We also discuss the characteristics of workplace learning that make WPLA proposals different from LA in formal education contexts and the challenges resulting from this. We found that WPLA is gaining momentum, especially in some fields, like healthcare and education. The focus on theory is generally a positive feature in WPLA, but we encourage a stronger focus on assessing the impact of WPLA in realistic settings.

Despite the ubiquity of learning in the everyday life of most workplaces, the learning analytics community only has paid attention to such settings very recently. One probable reason for this oversight is the fact that learning in the workplace is often informal, hard to grasp and not univocally defined. This paper summarizes the state of the art of Workplace Learning Analytics (WPLA), extracted from a systematic literature review of five academic databases as well as other known sources in the WPLA community. Our analysis of existing proposals discusses particularly on the role of different conceptions of learning and their influence on the LA proposals’ design and technology choices. We end the paper by discussing opportunities for future work in this emergent field.

This paper reports the design and development of a visual Dashboard, called the SSS Dashboard, which visualizes data from informal workplace learning processes from different viewpoints. The SSS Dashboard retrieves its data from the Social Semantic Server (SSS), an infrastructure that integrates data from several workplace learning applications into a semantically-enriched Artifact-Actor Network. A first evaluation with end users in a course for professional teachers gave promising results. Both a trainer and a learner could understand the learning process from different perspectives using the SSS Dashboard. The results obtained will pave the way for the development of future Learning Analytics applications that exploit the data collected by the SSS.

This paper presents the potential of a social semantic infrastructure that implements an Actor Artifact Network (AAN) with the final goal of supporting learning analytics at the workplace. Two applications were built on top of such infrastructure and make use of the emerging relations of such a AAN. A preliminary evaluation shows that an AAN can be created out of the usage of both applications, thus opening the possibility to implement learning analytics at the workplace.

This paper presents our experiences using a social semantic infrastructure that implements a semantically-enriched Actor Artifact Network (AAN) to support informal learning at the workplace. Our previous research led us to define the Model of Scaling Informal Learning, to identify several common practices when learning happens at the workplace, and to propose a social semantic infrastructure able to support them. This paper shows this support by means of two illustrative examples where practitioners employed several applications integrated into the infrastructure. Thus, this paper clarifies how workplace learning processes can be supported with such infrastructure according to the aforementioned model. The initial analysis of these experiences gives promising results since it shows how the infrastructure mediates in the sharing of contextualized learning artifacts and how it builds up an AAN that makes explicit the relationships between actors and artifacts when learning at the workplace.