Award Archives - EduTec Science

May62024 by Sebastian WollnyNo Comments

Dr. Daniel Schiffner Receives the First Edutec Award

Award, Team

The newly created Edutec Prize was awarded to Dr. Daniel Schiffner, a leading supporter of the Edutec team. He has shown exceptional commitment to keeping the educational technologies up and running and restoring the systems after the cyber attack. [caption id="attachment_6284" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Hendrik Drachsler and the Edutec team congratulate Dr. Daniel Schiffner on this achievement.[/caption] A Trailblazer in Education Technology Dr. Daniel Schiffner serves as the Arbeitsbereichsleiter (Head of Department) for Bildungsinformatik (Educational Informatics) at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education. His work focuses on leveraging technology to enhance teaching and learning processes. Dr. Schiffner’s expertise lies at the intersection of education, data science, and digital tools. Together with his team, he enables educational researchers to make use of state of the art technologies.…

Apr112024 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

Team led by Sebastian Gombert wins one of two tracks at BEA 2024 shared task on predicting Item Difficulty and Item Response Time

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Award, Computational Psychometrics, Conference, Higher Education, New Pub, Workshop

For standardized exams to be fair and reliable, they must include a diverse range of question difficulties to accurately assess test taker abilities. Additionally, it's crucial to balance the time allotted per question to avoid making the test unnecessarily rushed or sluggish. The goal of this year's BEA shared task (competition) was to build systems which could predict Item Difficulty and Item Response Time for items taken from the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). EduTec member Sebastian Gombert designed systems which are able to predict both variables simultaneously. These placed first out of 43 for predicting Item Difficulty and fitfth out of 34 for predicting Item Response Time. They use modified versions of established transformer language models in a multitask setup. A corresponding system description paper titled Predicting Item…

Dec142023 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

PhD defense on Technological Responses to Distracting Media Multitasking in Digital Learning Environments

Award, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, PhD defense, School, Self-Regulation

Today, we proudly acknowledge the remarkable achievement of our team member, Daniel Biedermann, in successfully defending his PhD thesis to become Dr. Biedermann. Woohoo, congratulations! In our modern world, the reality of digital distractions through the attention economy cannot be denied. Countries like the Netherlands, for instance, are planning to ban mobiles from classrooms starting from 2024. Daniel's PhD work centered on the complex challenges of digital media distraction, a phenomenon that's prevalent largely due to our pervasive use of social media and notification systems on our phones, PCs, and tablets. Presented in his disputation, Daniel argued the need for a context-sensitive system to gain a more profound understanding of digital media distraction. In addition, Daniel addressed the crucial subject of digital self-control tools (DSCTs). His research, which provided a…

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,…

Sep162022 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

EC-TEL2022 best demo award goes to EduTec

Award, Conference

The demo paper Superpowers in the Classroom: Hyperchalk is an Online Whiteboard for Learning Analytics Data Collection and the corresponding tool Hyperchalk by Lukas Menzel, Sebastian Gombert, Daniele Di Mitri and Hendrik Drachsler were awarded the best demo award at the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 2022. Hyperchalk allows hosting collaborative whiteboards which can be used to collaborate in real-time. It collects rich user data which can be used to conduct learning analytics. Hyperchalk was initially developed for the ALICE project.

Sep122022 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

DGHD Nachwuchspreis for Joshua Weidlich

Award, Conference, Higher Education, PhD defense

At this year's DGHD2022 in Paderborn, the German Society for Higher Education Pedagogy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hochschuldidaktik: DGHD) awarded Dr. Joshua Weidlich for his dissertation on the topic of social presence in online distance education. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Theo Bastiaens, he conducted his dissertation at FernUniversität in Hagen, the largest distance education provider in Germany. The jury commended the scientific merits of advancing this line of research while also providing ample practical implications for higher education teaching. The dissertation is available online here and further information about the award will be published here.

Aug192022 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

EARLI EFG Grant awarded

Award

The European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) offers an Emerging Field Group (EFG) funding scheme. The goal of the EFG initiative is to support the development of a research group focused on exploratory, innovative, and risk-taking research. EARLI supports the EFG over the course of a two-year period. See the following video for a short intro about EFG funding: [embed]https://youtu.be/P3ErXQdLU2U[/embed] This year, the EARLI EFG committee awarded funding to the "Social- and Telepresence in Online Social Learning" emerging field group, which consists of Emmy Vrieling Teunter (Open University, Netherlands), Kamakshi Rajagopal (KU Leuven, Belgium), Karel Kreijns (Open University, Netherlands), Maartje Henderikx (Open University, Netherlands), Derya Orhan Göksün (Adiyaman University, Turkey), and Joshua Weidlich (DIPF, Germany). The group will explore how perceptions of social-and telepresence are fostered in…

Apr302022 by Daniele Di MitriNo Comments

Daniele Di Mitri becomes a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy

Award

On Friday 29th of April, Dr Daniele Di Mitri has been awarded as a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy of Goethe University an organization that gathers early career researchers at Goethe University, TU Darmstadt, University of Mainz and collaborating institutes such as DIPF. The Johanna Quandt Young Academy is a platform to share knowledge across disciplines and to learn about research approaches of other disciplines. It brings together young scientists and outstanding leaders of the international science community to debate about and generate new ideas and concepts for defined topics and formulate science-based solutions for the future development of society with the intention of forming a strong voice to impact university and global development through policy statements. The Award Ceremony featured welcome speeches by Prof. Dr Enrico Schleiff,…

Feb282022 by Jane YauNo Comments

Young Scientist member at Global Young Academy (2022-27)

Award, Press

An honour and privilege, Dr. Jane Yau joins the Global Young Academy as a Young Scientist member, starting in June 2022 and serving a five-year term. As a passionate and dedicated researcher in Mobile Learning and Educational Technologies since 2003, this membership gives Jane the opportunity to align her research efforts and collaboratively with the other members of the Academy to (1) help tackle the current global educational crisis with school closures; (2) bridge the digital, educational, and curriculum gaps and (3) support the development of young scientists into science leaders of the future. Jane’s vision for improving the state of the sciences/research and the situation of young scientists/scholars worldwide is: “There needs to be a more balanced proportion of young female and male scientists (under 20) to act as…

Jan252022 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

Team of EduTec and TBA Members Wins Runners-Up Prize @ NAEP Reading Automated Scoring Challenge

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Award, Computational Psychometrics, School

The NAEP Reading Automated Scoring Challenge was a competition which was held in late 2021 by the National Center for Education (USA). The goal was to evaluate the applicability of natural language processing methodology to the task of scoring of large scale constructed response assessment data. In addition to this, participating models were also required to be interpretable and free of algorithmic bias against different student demographics. The data set which was used to evaluate the systems consisted of responses from 4th and 8th grade school student to 20 different reading comprehension tasks. More than a dozen different teams from universities and private assessment companies submitted contributions. Out of these, 12 contributions, including ours, were selected as eligible with respect to interpretability and algorithmic fairness. These contributions were then ranked…