Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics at Australia’s University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC)—an innovation center where students and staff can explore education data science applications. Simon holds a Ph.D from the University of York, and is known for bringing a human-centered approach to analytics and development. He also co-founded the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), which is committed to advancing learning through ethical, educationally sound data science.
In this episode, Simon and I discuss the state of education technology (edtech), privacy, human-centered design in the context of using AI in higher ed, and the numerous technological advancements that are re-shaping the higher level education landscape.
Our conversation covered:
Designing for Analytics
simon.buckinghamshum.net
Simon on LinkedIn
#experiencingdata
Designing for Analytics Podcast
Quotes from Today’s Episode“We are seeing AI products coming out. Some of them are great, and are making a huge difference for learning STEM type subjects— science, tech, engineering, and medicine. But some of them are not getting the balance right.” — Simon
“The trust break-down will come, and has already come in certain situations, when students feel they’re being tracked…” — Simon, on students perceiving BI solutions as surveillance tools instead of beneficial
“Increasingly, it’s great to see so many people asking critical questions about the biases that you can get in training data, and in algorithms as well. We want to ask questions about whether people are trusting this technology. It’s all very well to talk about big data and AI, etc., but ultimately, no one’s going to use this stuff if they don’t trust it.” — Simon
“I’m always asking what’s the user experience going to be? How are we actually going to put something in front of people that they’re going to understand…” — Simon
“There are lots of success stories, and there are lots of failure stories. And that’s just what you expect when you’ve got edtech companies moving at high speed.” — Simon
“We’re dealing, on the one hand, with poor products that give the whole field a bad name, but on the other hand, there are some really great products out there that are making a tangible difference, and teachers are extremely enthusiastic about.” — Simon
“There’s good evidence now, about the impact that some of these tools can have on learning. Teachers can give some homework out, and the next morning, they can see on their dashboard which questions were the students really struggling with.” — Simon
“The area that we’re getting more and more interested in, and which educators are getting more and more interested in, are the kinds of skills and competencies you need for a very complex future workplace.” — Simon
“We obviously want the students’ voice in the design process. But that has to be balanced with all the other voices are there as well, like the educators’ voice, as well as the technologists, and the interaction designers and so forth.” — Simon on the nuance of UX considerations for students
“…you have to balance satisfying the stakeholder with actually what is needed.” — Brian
“…we’re really at the mercy of behavior. We have to try and infer, from behavior or traces, what’s going on in the mind, of the humans we are studying.” — Simon
“We might say, “Well, if we see a student writing like this, using these kinds of textual features that we can pick up using natural language processing, and they revise their draft writing in response to feedback that we’ve provided automatically, well, that looks like progress. It looks like they’re thinking more critically, or it looks like they’re reflecting more deeply on an experience they’ve had, for example, like a work placement.” — Simon
“They’re in products already, and when they’re used well, they can be effective. But they can also be sort of weapon of mass destruction if you use them badly.” — Simon, on predictive models
104 - Surfacing the Unarticulated Needs of Users and Stakeholders through Effective Listening
103 - Helping Pediatric Cardiac Surgeons Make Better Decisions with ML featuring Eugenio Zuccarelli of MIT Media Lab
102 - CDO Spotlight: The Non-Technical Roles Data Science and Analytics Teams Need to Drive Adoption of Data Products w/ Iván Herrero Bartolomé
101 - Insights on Framing IOT Solutions as Data Products and Lessons Learned from Katy Pusch
100 - Why Your Data, AI, Product & Business Strategies Must Work Together (and Digital Transformation is The Wrong Framing) with Vin Vashishta
099 - Don’t Boil the Ocean: How to Generate Business Value Early With Your Data Products with Jon Cooke, CTO of Dataception
098 - Why Emilie Schario Wants You to Run Your Data Team Like a Product Team
097 - Why Regions Bank’s CDAO, Manav Misra, Implemented a Product-Oriented Approach to Designing Data Products
096 - Why Chad Sanderson, Head of Product for Convoy’s Data Platform, is a Champion of Data UX
095 - Increasing Adoption of Data Products Through Design Training: My Interview from TDWI Munich
094 - The Multi-Million Dollar Impact of Data Product Management and UX with Vijay Yadav of Merck
093 - Why Agile Alone Won’t Increase Adoption of Your Enterprise Data Products
092 - How to measure data product value from a UX and business lens (and how not to do it)
091 - How Brazil’s Biggest Fiber Company, Oi, Leverages Design To Create Useful Data Products with Sr. Exec. Design Manager, João Critis
090 - Michelle Carney’s Mission With MLUX: Bringing UX and Machine Learning Together
089 - Reader Questions Answered about Dashboard UX Design
088 - Doing UX Research for Data Products and The Magic of Qualitative User Feedback with Mike Oren, Head of Design Research at Klaviyo
087 - How Data Product Management and UX Integrate with Data Scientists at Albertsons Companies to Improve the Grocery Shopping Experience
086 - CED: My UX Framework for Designing Analytics Tools That Drive Decision Making
085 - Dr. William D. Báez on the Journey and ROI of Integrating UX Design into Machine Learning and Analytics Solutions
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