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
084 - The Messy Truth of Designing and Building a Successful Analytics SAAS Product featuring Jonathan Kay (CEO, Apptopia)
083 -Why Bob Goodman Thinks Product Management and Design Must Dance Together to Create “Experience Layers” for Data Products
082 - What the 2021 $1M Squirrel AI Award Winner Wants You To Know About Designing Interpretable Machine Learning Solutions w/ Cynthia Rudin
081 - The Cultural and $ Benefits of Human-Centered AI in the Enterprise: Digging Into BCG/MIT Sloan’s AI Research w/ François Candelon
080 – How to Measure the Impact of Data Products…and Anything Else with Forecasting and Measurement Expert Doug Hubbard
079 - How Sisu’s CPO, Berit Hoffmann, Is Approaching the Design of Their Analytics Product…and the UX Mistakes She Won’t Make Again
078 - From Data to Product: What is Data Product Management and Why Do We Need It with Eric Weber
077 - Productizing Analytics for Performing Arts Organizations with AMS Analytics CPO Jordan Gross Richmond
076 - How Bedrock’s “Data by Design” Mantra Helps Them Build Human-Centered Solutions with Jesús Templado
075 - How CDW is Integrating Design Into Its Data Science and Analytics Teams with Prasad Vadlamani
074 - Why a Former Microsoft ML/AI Researcher Turned to Design to Create Intelligent Products from Messy Data with Abhay Agarwal, Founder of Polytopal
073 - Addressing the Functional and Emotional Needs of Users When Designing Data Products with Param Venkataraman
072 - How to Get Stakeholders to Reveal What They Really Need From a Data Product with Cindy Dishmey Montgomery
071 - The ROI of UX Research and How It Applies to Data Products with Bill Albert
070 - Fighting Fire with ML, the AI Incident Database, and Why Design Matters in AI-Driven Software with Sean McGregor
069 - The Role of Creativity and Product Thinking in Data Monetization with ‘Infonomics’ Author Doug Laney
068 - Why User Adoption of Enterprise Data Products Continues to Lag with International Institute for Analytics Executive VP Drew Smith
067 - Why Roche Diagnostics’ BI and Data Science Teams Are Adopting Human-Centered Design and UX featuring Omar Khawaja
066 - How Alison Magyari Used Design Thinking to Transform Eaton’s Business Analytics Approach to Creating Data Products
065 - Balancing Human Intuition and Machine Intelligence with Salesforce Director of Product Management Pavan Tumu
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