In the context of the hessian project, Digital gestütztes Lehren und Lernen in Hessen (digLL) organized the Innovation forum Trusted Learning Analytics (TLA) on 4th of February a workshop on Learning Analytics supported Learning Design with Marcel Schmitz. Marcel Schmitz is working for more than 16 years in Higher Education at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the South of the Netherlands. His career at Zuyd started as a Technical Support Engineer and Developer on the learning management system and soon he began to implement and develop several learning enhancing technologies. In 2007 Marcel started to combine his support job, with a job as technology-enhanced learning advisor for all faculties at Zuyd and a teaching role at Zuyd Faculty of Information and Communication Technology. In 2009 Marcel became a team coordinator of the Informatics department. In 2012 he was part of a team of educational coordinators that implemented a new study at the faculty. From 2016 he is working as a researcher at the Zuyd research center of data intelligence and as an external PhD at the Open University of The Netherlands. The research is on Learning analytics supported learning design.

Within his PhD thesis, he invented the FoLA – Fellowship of the Learning Activity game. With FoLA instructional designers/teachers are enabled to design learning activities that are supported by learning analytics. Within the interactive role game, a group of teachers can identify needed indicators and metrics for having the right and supportive learning analytics for their course design. Marcel Schmitz one of the keynote speakers of the Learning Analytics 4 School Workshop at the 10th LAK20 conference. Within this workshop, he will demonstrate the FoLA game to 80 teachers in Germany and teach them learning analytics supported learning design in a playful manner.