Keynote: 5 years of Highly Informative Learning Analytics

Keynote: 5 years of Highly Informative Learning Analytics

Artificial Intelligence, Conference, Feedback, Higher Education, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Research Methods, School
Five years in forty minutes On 7 October 2026, Hendrik Drachsler gave a keynote at the CBIE 2026 conference in Goiana, Brazil, that tried something unusual: time travel. He compressed five years of field research, seven projects and roughly 5,750 students into one forty-minute talk. The question behind the keynote was simple: after five years of developing and testing Highly Informative Learning Analytics (HILA) in real lecture halls, what do we actually know? Not what we hoped HILA might achieve back in 2020, but what five years of our own research and data now tell us. What HILA set out to do HILA starts with a modest observation: most lecture rooms still offer very little personalisation. Learning analytics promised to change that, but its rollout in Europe stalled on four…
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PhD defense: Congratulations, Dr. Manuel Valle Torre!

PhD defense: Congratulations, Dr. Manuel Valle Torre!

Artificial Intelligence, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, PhD defense, School
Today, 07.10.2026 at 15:00, Manuel Valle Torre successfully defended his PhD thesis "Sequences in Data to Represent Learning Processes: What have you tried until now?" at Delft University of Technology. Hendrik Drachsler was honoured to take part as an independent member of the doctoral committee. [pdf-embedder url="https://edutec.science/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Manuel-defense-slides.pdf"] Manuel's thesis starts with a question every programming tutor knows: "What have you tried until now?" Digital learning environments usually assess only the final product, so this question is hard for them to answer. In three phases, Manuel shows how sequences of learner actions can be used to understand learning processes and support them while they happen. He developed ELAT for analysing edX log data, reviewed the field of learning sequence analysis, and studied problem-solving in data science notebooks. He then built JELAI,…
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