Designing a Social Learning Analytics Tool for Open Annotation and Collaborative Learning

This book chapter recounts one approach to ethically co-designing a public dashboard that reports social learning analytics and encourages learners’ collaborative annotation across open texts and contexts. As a design narrative in the learning sciences, this chapter is a reflective, first-hand account organized around three related objectives: 1) Naming the theoretical stances toward open and social learning that informed design and research; 2) Describing key decisions and trade-offs pertinent to four iterations of a social learning analytics dashboard; and 3) Considering epistemological, technological, and infrastructural implications for the development and use of social learning analytics in open, flexible, and distance learning.