When I began my PhD study I thought I was going to be able to make some data-rich tools, demonstrate that they could be beneficial for education and everyone would be falling over themselves to adopt. The reality I found was that there was little architecture in place to allow data science to be engaged with, particularly in the Further Education sector, but also sadly within some Higher Education institutions too. Additionally, the intersection between people who were trained in data science and knowledgeable of education was a narrow part of a venn diagram. So, rather than plough on and make things that would have no impact, I refactored what I was doing and developed a novel methodological approach to developing data rich tools for education.
I published on an earlier version with colleagues from the Learning Layers project and further refined the process for this particular context. I demonstrate its use in my thesis research and hope that it will enable many others to work with stakeholders they otherwise may not have been able to collaborate with, to bring about the sea-change in educational thinking that data is poised to trigger.