NC State College of Education Launches Online Graduate Certificate Program in Learning Analytics This Fall

NC State College of Education launched a new, fully online Graduate Certificate Program in Learning Analytics this fall.

Offered through the college’s Learning Design and Technology Program in collaboration with the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, the learning analytics program is designed to help education researchers and practitioners learn how to efficiently, effectively and ethically leverage education data from a variety of digital resources and tools in order to understand and improve student learning.

“We now have emerging computational techniques and open source products that can be applied to the study of increasingly available digital data sets about education, including digital assessment artifacts, social media posts, online course interaction data and public data sets,” said Kevin Oliver, Ph.D., professor of learning design and technology and program coordinator.

Students will have the opportunity to learn about education data sets, sources and formats, as well as popular techniques, such as text mining, machine learning and network analysis. The program will also give students an opportunity to use popular tools such as R, Tableau and Gephi, while learning effective strategies for communicating their findings.

“The certificate is ideal for education researchers, evaluators and educators who work extensively with student data and would like to develop their capacity to query education data sets and visualize or model trends toward improved learning approaches, settings and systems,” said Oliver.

Students complete 12 credit hours of online, graduate-level coursework in one year — taking one course in the fall, two courses in the spring and one final course over an extended ten-week summer term. Courses are taught by Shiyan Jiang, Ph.D., assistant professor of learning design and technology at the College of Education and Shaun Kellogg, Ph.D., director of the research and evaluation team at the Friday Institute, which is a part of the college and which supports in-service teachers and K-12 schools across North Carolina and beyond by conducting research, developing resources and providing professional development programs.

All students must start the program in the fall semester. Applications are currently being accepted for the fall cohort.