It is not easy developing a community around Workplace Learning Analytics but there are some signs of emerging interest.

On 23 September 2016, in Leeds, there is an open workshop on Workplace Learning Analytics, sponsored by the Learning Layers project. The invitation to the workshop runs as follows.

Up to now, the Learning Analytics community has not paid much attention to workplace and professional scenarios, where, in contrast to formal education, learning is driven by demands of work tasks and intrinsic interest of the learner. Hence, learning processes at the workplace are typically informal and not related to a pedagogical scenario. But workplace and professional learners can benefit from their own and others’ learning outcomes as they will potentially increase learning awareness, knowledge sharing and scaling-up learning practices.

Some approaches to Learning Analytics at the workplace have been suggested. On the one hand, the topic of analytics in smart industries has extended its focus to some learning scenarios, such as how professionals adopt innovations or changes at the workplace; on the other hand, the Learning Analytics community is increasing its attention to informal scenarios, professional training courses and teaching analytics. For this reason, we consider that it a great moment to collect all this interest to build up a community related to workplace and professional Learning Analytics.

• We invite you to take part in the workshop which will have two main activities:
  During the morning all the participants will shortly present their research work or the research questions they are working on. Thus, we can find common problems, synergies and potential collaborations in future projects.
• During the afternoon we can work on smaller groups to discuss some community-building mechanisms: follow-up workshops (maybe at LAK’17), potential grant applications, creation of an on-line community, collaboration in current or future projects, collaboration with other researchers or research communities… etc.

To register, please send an email to: Tamsin Treasure-Jones (t [dot] treasure-jones [at] leeds [dot] ac [dot] uk)