Publication – EduTec Science

Jun62023 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New pub: Lernpfade in adaptiven und künstlich-intelligenten Lernprogramme

Artificial Intelligence, Book chapter, Learning Analytics, Publication, Research Methods, Research topic

In this newly published book chapter, the authors delve into the comparison between interactive, adaptive and artificially intelligent learning programs. While adaptive and AI-based applications offer promising potential, they face greater complexity in their development and have yet to fully establish themselves. To evaluate the prospects of these technologies, their respective capabilities are explored. Adaptive learning programs prove effective in skill acquisition, while AI-based solutions shine in cases where an explicit expertise model is challenging to articulate. The didactic and pedagogical challenges that lie ahead for AI-based learning applications are also highlight. By examining these factors, valuable insights are gained into the landscape of advanced learning technologies and their future implications. Reference: Kerres, M., Buntins, K., Buchner, J., Drachsler, H., & Zawacki-Richter, O.. (In Press). Lernpfade in adaptiven und künstlich-intelligenten…

Jun62023 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New pub: Evaluating the Impact of FoLA on Learning Analytics Knowledge Creation

Journal, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Publication, Research Methods, Research topic, Special Issue

Learning analytics provides opportunities to improve the design of learning activities by supplying information on the effects of different learning approaches. Despite the existence of design methods that aim to facilitate the incorporation of learning analytics into learning design, there is a lack of research assessing their efficacy. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the FoLA2 method. In higher education settings, sixty participants utilized the FoLA2 method to develop fourteen learning activities. To gauge the impact, participants completed a technology acceptance test before and after each session. Furthermore, researchers analyzed audio recordings of the sessions using epistemic network analysis to gain insights into the discussions regarding learning analytics and the creation of enhanced learning activities. The results from both the technology acceptance test and the epistemic network analysis…

Jun22023 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New pub: Digitalisierung und Diagnostik in Schulen – Herausforderungen für Bildungspraxis und Bildungsforschung

Assessment, Book chapter, Computational Psychometrics, Digitalisation, Learning Analytics, Publication, Research Methods, Research topic, School, Target group

In the spring of 2020, schools faced an unprecedented challenge as the pandemic disrupted traditional modes of instruction and school development. With on-site learning replaced by digital formats and distance communication, educators had to quickly adapt to the new normal. Amidst these changes, the field of education encountered specific challenges related to digital school management, digital learning, and assessing learning progress. Particularly, computer-aided diagnostics emerged as a valuable tool for gaining insights not only into learning outcomes but also into the learning process itself. Researchers became intrigued by the potential of digital media in shaping learning experiences and how the resulting data could be effectively utilized in educational practice. This paper explores the current challenges and potentials in computer-based, learning-accompanying diagnostics. The primary hurdles involve implementing suitable instruments within schools…

May312023 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

New pub: Causal reasoning with causal graphs, published in ETRD

Journal, Publication, Research Methods, Special Issue, Uncategorized

Educational Technology, like many other empirical research fields, needs to provide evidence for the causal effectiveness of their interventions. This is as important for establishing the efficacy of some novel educational technology as it is for theory-building. However, because educational research, especially field research, can be messy, tightly-controlled randomized experiments are not always the best option. Importantly, as our development paper shows, this does not mean that researchers should abandon all claims of causality. Instead, we highlight the importance of explicit causal reasoning, while equipping researchers with a tool to approach this daunting task systematically. Causal graphs (or Directed Acyclic Graphs = DAGs) are a low-barrier approach to reasoning about causality in all research contexts. Using a few construction rules, the resultant graphs allow researchers to figure out whether a…

May152023 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

New research program: Towards Highly Informative Learning Analytics

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Book, Computational Psychometrics, Computer-supported collaborative learning, Feedback, Further Education, Higher Education, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Research Methods, School

On May 12, 2023, the Highly Informative Learning Analytics (HILA) research program of the EduTec@DIPF, studiumdigitale@Goethe University Frankfurt and the Open Learning and Instruction group@Open Universiteit was presented by Hendrik Drachsler at the main campus of the Open University of the Netherlands. The release of the HILA research program marks a significant milestone for the collaboration in the field of learning analytics between of the Dutch-German research collective. The HILA research program is focused on developing new tools and methods to collect, analyze, and interpret data that can help educational institutions to understand the learning process better. As part of the program's launch, a keynote by Ioana Jivet on student-facing learning analytics was provided. Ioana reported on two empirical studies investigating the effect of data-driven feedback on students. [pdf-embedder url="https://edutec.science/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023_05-Keynote-Symposium-Hendrik.pdf"…

May42023 by Ioana JivetNo Comments

New Pub: A checklist to guide the planning, designing, implementation, and evaluation of learning analytics dashboards

Journal, Learning Analytics, Publication

Higher education institutions are moving to design and implement teacher-facing learning analytics (LA) dashboards with the hope that instructors can extract deep insights about student learning and make informed decisions to improve their teaching. While much attention has been paid to developing teacher-facing dashboards, less is known about how they are designed, implemented and evaluated. This paper presents a systematic literature review of existing studies reporting on teacher-facing LA dashboards. Out of the 1968 articles retrieved from several databases, 50 articles were included in the final analysis. Guided by several frameworks, articles were coded based on the following dimensions: purpose, theoretical grounding, stakeholder involvement, ethics and privacy, design, implementation, and evaluation criteria. The findings show that most dashboards are designed to increase teachers’ awareness but with limited actionable insights to…

Apr122023 by Daniel BiedermannNo Comments

Paper and presentation about the topic of detecting disengaged reading at LAK23

Conference, Conference, Event, Higher Education, Publication, Research topic, Self-Regulation, Target group

At the recent Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK23), Daniel Biedermann presented his paper "Detecting the Disengaged Reader - Using Scrolling Data to Predict Disengagement during Reading," to shed light on the potential for early detection of disengagement in readers. The paper presents a unique method for early disengagement detection that relies solely on the classification of scrolling data. By transforming scrolling data into a time series representation, each point of the series represents the vertical position of the viewport in the text document. Time series classification algorithms are then used to evaluate the data.The results were promising, with the method able to classify disengagement early with up to 70% accuracy. However, the study also observed differences in performance depending on which texts were included in the training dataset. Biedermann…

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…

Feb272023 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

Book Chapter – A Trusted Learning Analytics Dashboard for Displaying OER

Book, Book chapter, Learning Analytics, Open access, Project, Report

Abstract Learning Analytics (LA) consists of miscellaneous steps that include data harvesting, storing, cleaning, anonymisation, mining, analysis, and visualisation so that the vast amount of educational data is comprehensible and ethically utilisable by educators or instructors to obtain the advantages and benefits that LA can bring to the educational scene. These include the potential to increase learning experiences and reduce dropout rates. In this chapter, we shed light on OER repositories, LA, and LA dashboards and present an implementation of a research-driven LA dashboard for displaying OER and their repositories that allows the visualisation of educational data in an understandable way for both educators and learners. Moreover, we present an LA dashboard for displaying OER that shows information about the existing German OER repositories as part of our EduArc project…