March 2023 - EduTec Science

Mar202023 by Ioana JivetNo Comments

Reelection in the Executive Committee of SoLAR

Ioana Jivet has been reelected to the Executive Committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) for another mandate of two years 2023-2025. The Executive committee governs the society's work and meets regularly to decide on matters of policy, general business, the tabling of reports from any Committee and any other matter that requires the Executive’s decision-making powers. The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) is an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers who are exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development. SoLAR has been active in organizing the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) and the Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI), launching multiple initiatives to support collaborative and open research around learning analytics, promoting the publication and dissemination of learning analytics research, and advising and…

Mar202023 by Ioana JivetNo Comments

Highly Informative LA Workshop at LAK23

Conference, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Workshop

On the 13th of March 2023, as part of the LAK23 conference, five EduTec team members (Daniele Di Mitri, Ioana Jivet, Sebastian Gombert, Atezaz Ahmad and Hendrik Drachsler) organised a full-day workshop on Highly Informative Learning Analytics with Marcel Schmitz from Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. In this workshop, we investigated the concept of highly informative learning analytics and proposed a methodology for designing an environment that delivers highly informative learning analytics. The workshop is intended as a hands-on, interactive session that allows participants to test the methodology’s potential in a realistic use case. The proposed approach is based on the four-stage process of the Design Cycle for Education (DC4E). We exemplify practical tools that were designed in-house for each stage, including a tool to support teachers while…

Mar202023 by Ioana JivetNo Comments

Best Short Paper Award Nomination @LAK23

Award, Conference, Conference, Higher Education, Learning Analytics

The protection of students’ privacy in learning analytics (LA) applications is critical for cultivating trust and effective implementations of LA in educational environments around the world. However, students’ privacy concerns and how they may vary along demographic dimensions that historically influence these concerns have yet to be studied in higher education. Gender differences, in particular, are known to be associated with people's information privacy concerns, including in educational settings. Building on an empirically validated model and survey instrument for student privacy concerns, their antecedents and their behavioral outcomes, we investigate the presence of gender differences in students’ privacy concerns about LA. We conducted a survey study of students in higher education across five countries (N = 762): Germany, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Using multiple regression analysis,…

Mar82023 by Sebastian WollnyNo Comments

New Pub: Students’ expectations of Learning Analytics across Europe

Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics

What do European students expect from Learning Analytics? To help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) develop and implement Learning Analytics systems that support students' learning, a new article of Sebastian Wollny et al. investigates in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning the individual LA expectations of European higher education students. In this article a ‘Student Expectations of Learning Analytics Questionnaire’ (SELAQ) survey with 417 participating students was applied at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) and compared with responses of students from Madrid (Spain), Edinburgh (United Kingdom) and the Netherlands. Results: The results show that students’ expectations at Goethe University Frankfurt itself are rather homogeneous regarding ‘LA Ethics and Privacy’ and ‘LA Service Features’. Furthermore, it reveals that European students generally show a consistent pattern of expectations of LA with a high…

Mar82023 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

Dissemination event for the AFELK project

Event, Feedback, Project, Project meeting, Research topic, School, Target group

Digital lessons can help track individual student learning progression, analyze the extent to which they are productive and report this information back to teachers. But how can this individual learning progression and the learning difficulties that arise in the process be depicted? The research project AFLEK "Analyse und Förderung von Lernverläufen zur Entwicklung von Kompetenzen" (Analysis and Support of Learning Trajectories for the Development of Competencies) is currently looking for answers to this issue. The interdisciplinary project team uses so-called teacher dashboards to provide physics teachers with almost real-time feedback on the learning progress of their students. The information from digital teaching units helps identify productive and unproductive learning progression; this information can then help to automatically recolonize learning difficulties und derive feedback for the teachers to support more productive…

Mar72023 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

New Pub: Caught in the Lifelong Learning Maze: Helping People with Learning Analytics and Chatbots to Find Personal Career Paths

Higher Education, Learning Analytics

Abstract—Current lifelong learning platforms offer users a query option to select a wide variety of courses. However, finding a suitable course among the seemingly endless catalogs of options presented by the platforms is not straightforward. We argue that digital counseling can enhance this process. In this paper, we present a set of three formative studies where we explored the main aspects that can provide the counseling needed. The methods comprise an analysis of user profile characteristics and learning analytics indicators (e.g., learning progress/self-regulation) by means of an expert workshop, evaluating the feasibility of current technologies (e.g., natural language processing) for automatically assessing users' competencies, and a survey on the use of Chatbots as the interaction interface between the users and the lifelong learning portals. The analysis resulted in the extraction…

Mar32023 by Jane YauNo Comments

GREAT Project kick-off on 1-2 March

Citizens science, Game, Project, Project meeting

A fruitful and successful kick-off meeting for the GREAT project (Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation, co-funded by EU and UKRI) with all consortium partners was held on 1-2 March. DIPF project members (Hendrik, Jane, Dana) hosted the 2-day kick-off meeting, which covered all work package activities for the coming 12 months. The project uses games to engage citizens and collect anonymised data regarding climate crisis attitudes and opinions. These are then anonymously analysed and sent to policy-makers, with the aim of influencing them to make even better climate emergency policies more suited to citizens' needs. Two different types of games will be tested: (1.) With simple quiz games on mobile phones - this can reach high numbers of users and thus large data volumes can be generated. The games will…