Event Archives - EduTec Science

Oct72026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

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…

Oct72026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

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,…

Sep302026 by GianlucaNo Comments

mISPL: Mini Framework for Intelligent Systems for Psychomotor Learning @ ECTEL 26

Conference, Workshop

I recently had the pleasure of presenting my latest work at the MILeS 2026 workshop (Fourth International Workshop on Multimodal Immersive Learning Systems), held during the ECTEL 2026 conference in Valencia, Spain. It was an incredible week of pushing the boundaries of technology-enhanced learning, exchanging ideas, and building lasting professional bonds. Here is a quick recap of my experience, from early-stage frameworks to visionary futures and unforgettable social gatherings. Part 1: Introducing mISPL In the first part of the workshop, I presented my paper: "mISPL: Mini Framework for Intelligent Systems for Psychomotor Learning". While comprehensive frameworks like PsyLearn exist for building full-fledged psychomotor tutoring systems, they can often feel overwhelming for researchers in the early stages of development. That is where mISPL comes in. It is a streamlined, accessible "mini"…

Aug172026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

Invited Talk at the NEES Center, Maceió, Brasil

Higher Education, Invited talk, Keynote, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Learning Design

In August, Hendrik Drachsler was invited to give a talk at the NEES research centre of the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL) in Maceió, hosted by Prof. Dr Diego Dermeval. The lecture, "Design, Development and Evaluation of Highly Informative Learning Analytics", was organised together with the PPGI graduate programme and drew a full house of 80 participants. Hendrik's argument was straightforward. Most learning analytics is not wrong; it is just not informative enough. Counting clicks and minutes tells a teacher that something happened, not what to do about it. Moving from descriptive to truly informative analytics takes three things: indicators grounded in learning theory, a design process that includes the educators who will use the results, and a governance framework that makes the whole thing defensible. He presented the tools…

Jul22026 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

Congratulations, Dr. Karademir! Turning Data into Pedagogical Action

Alumni, Learning Analytics, PhD defense

On 1 July 2026, Onur Karademir successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at the Goethe-University Frankfurt — and we could not be prouder. Onur joined the EduTec team in February 2021, but his story started even earlier: as a student frustrated by 90-minute maths lectures, he channelled that experience into founding StudyCore, an EdTech startup delivering digital teaching tools to universities and schools. That hands-on instinct — building things that actually reach learners — defined his entire PhD trajectory. His dissertation, Turning Data into Pedagogical Action: Designing the Learning Analytics Cockpit, a Teacher Dashboard for Feedback, tackles one of the most pressing challenges in educational technology: making learning analytics useful in real classrooms. Over three interconnected studies — a proof of concept, a co-design process with secondary school teachers and a…

Jun252026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

Keynote: From Experiment to Infrastructure: Reflections on AI in Higher Education

Academy, Artificial Intelligence, Conference, Higher Education, Keynote, Keynote

Today, Hendrik Drachsler gave a keynote at the VHB annual Conference in Bamberg, speaking to an audience of over 33 AI project leaders from higher education institutions in Germany. The topic was "From Experiment to Infrastructure: Scaling, Evaluation, and Governance of AI Systems in Higher Education," reflecting his thinking on various grassroots projects and how to scale them across the whole university. The gap between performance and learning Hendrik opened with a provocation: Is AI the new calculator? Both technologies automate cognitive processes, both faced early scepticism, and both promised efficiency gains. But the analogy breaks down quickly. A calculator takes over arithmetic, not problem-solving. AI takes over the formulation, analysis, and argument. That is a qualitative difference, and it demands a different institutional / governance response. Mixed results on…

Jun182026 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

JTELSS Workshop: Designing Empirical TEL Studies in Higher Education: Practical Research Insights from the CORE Project

Event, Workshop

The 20th EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning 2026 took place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The event featured a comprehensive program including inspiring keynote talks, mentoring activities, networking opportunities, and workshop presentations. The EduTec team, represented by Fabíola Gonçalves Coelho Ribeiro, Gianluca Romano, Leon Camus, and Sebastian Gombert had the opportunity to present the workshop Designing Empirical TEL Studies in Higher Education: Practical Research Insights from the CORE Project. The workshop highlighted the design, main characteristics, challenges, lessons learned, and key findings of the Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE) project. Through discussions based on real research experiences, participants explored how methodological decisions and research strategies can support the generation of meaningful evidence about learning processes in empirical and longitudinal studies within the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).…

Jun152026 by Nina MouhammadNo Comments

JTELSS workshop: Academic Note-Taking with Obsidian + Zotero

Summer School

Have you ever started writing the background section of a paper and suddenly thought: "Where did I read that again?" You know the finding, you remember it mattered, but you just can't place it. This is exactly the kind of problem this workshop was designed to help with, by building a note-taking system that lets you actually find what you've read, even years later, and make sense of it in context. The workshop was run by Nina Mouhammad at this year's Joint Technology-Enhanced Learning Summer School (JTELSS) in Bulgaria. After a welcome and a short introduction to the topic, we got into one of the more interesting parts of the session: a structured controversy on the question "Do I still need to read papers and make notes on them, if…

May212026 by Sebastian WollnyNo Comments

🤖 Robots in the Classroom — Sebastian Wollny on the “Sitzenbleiben” Podcast

Digitalisation, Press, Robots in Education, Transfer Activity

What do soccer-playing robots, telepresence droids, and 3D printers have in common? They're all reshaping what education looks like — and our very own Sebastian Wollny sat down with the DIPF parent podcast Sitzenbleiben to break it all down. 🎙️ 📣 Note: This episode is in German. Robotics in education is no longer a distant vision. In Episode 48 of Sitzenbleiben, Sebastian — researcher in our Educational Technologies group and trained electrical engineer with a specialization in automation — explains how robots are already making their way into schools and what that means for students and teachers alike. The conversation covers a surprisingly wide range of real-world applications: 🏫 Telepresence robots that let sick children stay physically "present" in their classroom — a friend can even take the robot-avatar along…

May122026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

How AI Systems Impact Mathematics Achievement in Rural Areas

Artificial Intelligence, PhD defense, School

On Friday, May 8, 2026, Rashmi Khazanchi successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, "Artificial Intelligence in Education: Impact of AI-Based Systems on Mathematics Achievement," at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen. The defense was supervised by Prof. Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, who holds a guest professorship at the Open Universiteit, alongside co-promotor Prof. Dr. Daniele Di Mitri (German University of Digital Sciences). The Research Question Khazanchi's work addresses a pressing challenge in education: whether AI-based learning systems can help close the mathematics achievement gap for students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Her research focused on students in a rural school district in South Georgia, USA — a setting often characterized by limited resources and a shortage of qualified teachers. What Was Studied The school implemented two AI-based systems to support struggling learners: ALEKS, an…