Last year I wrote about a relatively new site offering very interesting data and visualizations in the ed tech world. LISTedTECH was created by Justin Menard, who is Business Intelligence Senior Analyst at University of Ottawa. First of all, the site is broader in scope than just the LMS – there is a rich source of data & visualizations on MOOCs, university rankings, and IPEDS data. Most of the visualizations are presented by Tableau and therefore interactive in nature, allowing the user to filter data, zoom in on geographic data, etc. Since e-Literate is not set up for full-page visualizations, I have included screen shots below, but clicking on the image will take you to the appropriate LISTedTECH page.
Justin created the LISTedTECH site based on his frustration with getting valuable market information while working on an ERP project at the University of Ottawa. After taking a year-long travel sabbatical, he added a programmer to his team this past summer. Justin does not have immediate plans to monetize the site beyond hoping to pay for server time.
LISTedTECH is a wiki. Anyone can sign up and contribute data on institutions and products. Justin gets notifications of data added and verifies data.1 One of the key benefits of a wiki model is the ability to get user-defined data and even user ideas on useful data to include. Another benefit is the ability to scale. One of the key downsides of the wiki model is the need to clean out bad data, which can grow over time. Another downside is the selective sampling in data coverage.
LISTedTECH puts a priority on North America, and currently all ~140 Canadian schools are included. Justin and team are currently working to get complete, or near complete, US coverage. The one below could be titled If Ed Tech Were a Game of Risk, Moodle Wins.
As of today the site includes:
- Companies (511)
- Products (1,326)
- Institutions (27,595)
- Listed products used by institutions (over 18,000)
- Product Categories (36)
- Countries (235)
- World Rankings (9)
The biggest change since I wrote last year is that LISTedTech has moved to a new site.
We have (finally) launched our new website wiki.listedtech.com. As you might remember, our old Drupal based site had been wikified to try and make contributions easier and try to build a community around HigherEd tech data. Even if it was possible to edit and share information, it was difficult to get all the steps down, and in the right order.
With the new version of the site, we knew that we needed a better tool. The obvious choice was to use the Mediawiki platform. To attain our goal of better data, we souped it up with semantic extensions. This helps by structuring the data on the pages so that they can be queried like a database.
Another example shows the history of commercial MOOCs based on the number of partner institutions:
I’m a sucker for great visualizations, and there is a lot to see at the site. One example is on blended learning and student retention, using official IPEDS data in the US. “Blended in this case means that the institution offers a mix of face-to-face and online courses.
This is interesting – for 4-year institutions student retention positively there is a negative correlation with the percentage of courses available online, while for 2-year institutions the story is very different. That data invites additional questions and exploration.
All of the data for the website is available for download as XML files.
- He asks for people to include a link to source data to help in the QA process. [↩]
Thanks for this incredibly valuable data source!