“Not everything that can be counted, counts.” —Albert Einstein

As we start 2012, there are many industry research organizations identifying trends in the learning space and predicting key areas of increased scrutiny by Learning and Development (L&D) organizations. Of special interest to many of our clients (and also to GP Strategies) is in the emerging area of Learning Analytics.

For me, Learning Analytics falls under the larger trend we are seeing in both the governmental public sector and in the corporate world that has been termed by various research organizations as “Big Data.”

IBM describes Big Data on their Big Data website as follows:

“Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data―so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and from cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is Big Data.”

From a learning perspective, just like the rest of the Web-based world, the amount of information in learning—structured and unstructured—has exploded up in the past decade. Learners are creating more information, and they are making learning connections in increasingly complex ways. Some see it as a challenge and barrier; I see it as an opportunity for genuine data (evidence)-based learning breakthroughs. More information about learner activities will help us determine with much greater accuracy what works best in our curricula and instructional pedagogy.

So, how do we conquer this challenge of infinite learning data? We will need Learning Analytics designed for the learning world as it really exists; not in theory, but in practice. This is a world in which those “things” a learner needs to know and demonstrate the mastery of are dynamic, open-ended, and do not easily align (if at all) with our current assessment-based models, which require static and closed information sets.

EDUCAUSE, a premier research organization in the education space, identified Learning Analytics as a key trend in their 2011 Horizon Report, with an estimated time to adoption horizon of four to five years.

At its heart, Learning Analytics is about analyzing a wealth of information about learners in a way that allows L&D organizations to take informed action. Learning Analytics goes much further than just learner behavior; it can marry information from disparate sources to create a far more robust and nuanced profile of learners, in turn offering more insights and broader enterprise-wide implications for driving business impact.

So, hopefully as we continue this thread on measuring learning, we will explore new and exciting uncharted waters, resulting in our roles as leaders in L&D resembling those of pioneers and architects, and less of bureaucrats and maintenance engineers.