TOPEILA

Towards precision education: Idiographic learning analytics (TOPEILA) is an Academy of Finland funded project.  project aims to use data from individual students, analyse the data separately and deliver insights or recommendations based on self-data and explainable artificial intelligence. This is a departure from previous methods that collect data from many people and deliver insights according to the norms of “others”. When the data is very specific, it is expected to deliver specific insights, relevant recommendations.

Self-directedness, self-regulation, and self-control – inter alia– have all been around for decades. All such constructs embrace the quintessential element of “self” or “person” as a central point of departure from existing methods or theories. Nonetheless, research is conducted by using data from a “group of others” to derive generalizable laws or norms. Data collected from others barely represents any single person, and therefore, the norms and laws always fail to bring tangible progress in our understanding of human behavior. A paradigm shift is needed to bring the person into research and practice. That is, a shift towards characterizing the individual using person-specific or idiographic methods. This presentation discusses the shortcomings of current methods of doing research, shows why they fail, and introduces idiographic methods.

TOPIELA: PI Mohammed Saqr