Learning Analytics And Machine Learning In Higher Education With Mike Sharkey - No. 56

Learning While Working Podcast

The higher education sector has been using machine learning for some time, mostly to predict if students are at risk of dropping out of a program. In this series, I wanted to include an interview with someone who had been involved in this work, to see what L&D could learn from it. Mike Sharkey is one of the leaders in this area. His most recent past role was as Vice President of Analytics at Blackboard. It was great to be reminded by Mike in this interview that learning is a complex area and there are so many factors at play. Because of this it’s not a simple area for the application of machine learning. During the interview, Mike and I also briefly talk about privacy issues with analytics. As workplaces start to adopt more data-driven approaches to learning, there is a lot that we can learn about the work that has already been done in higher education, including how privacy issues can be approached.