Journal – EduTec Science

Oct232021 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

New Pub: Personality and Social Presence

October 23, 2021

Social presence is an important and well-established construct in learning scenarios that make use of online-based technology to mediate learning activities and communication among students, like online learning and distance education. Researchers and practitioners refer to social presence to better understand the socio-emotional dimension of these learning scenarios and/or improve the quality of the experience. As a construct that has emerged out of a socio-psychological research tradition, social presence has mostly been understood as a state variable, the result of situative/contextual factors, like the communication media, group size, or instructional design. What has been entirely overlooked is the possibility that some students are inherently more prone to experiencing social presence, while others may be less inclined to these perceptions. This study published in Open Education Studies, authored by Joshua Weidlich,…

Oct192021 by George Ciordas-HertelNo Comments

New Pub: Mobile Sensing with Smart Wearables of the Physical Context of Distance Learning Students to Consider Its Effects on Learning

October 19, 2021

General education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Lifelong Learning, Multimodal Learning Analytics, Open access, Project, Publication, Research topic, Target group, Technical paper, Uncategorized

Research shows that various contextual factors can have an impact on learning. Some of these factors can originate from the physical learning environment (PLE) in this regard. When learning from home, learners have to organize their PLE by themselves. This paper is concerned with identifying, measuring, and collecting factors from the PLE that may affect learning using mobile sensing. More specifically, this paper first investigates which factors from the PLE can affect distance learning. The results identify nine types of factors from the PLE associated with cognitive, physiological, and affective effects on learning. Subsequently, this paper examines which instruments can be used to measure the investigated factors. The results highlight several methods involving smart wearables (SWs) to measure these factors from PLEs successfully. Third, this paper explores how software infrastructure…

Oct182021 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

New Pub: Social Presence: Conceptualization and Measurement

October 18, 2021

Empirical Study, Journal, Literature review, Publication

Social presence is an important and well-established construct for learning scenarios that make use of online-based technology to mediate learning activities and communication among students. Researchers and practitioners refer to social presence to better understand the socio-emotional dimension of these learning scenarios and/or improve the quality of the experience. However, many researchers in the past have pointed to the shaky foundation that is the conceptualization and measurement of social presence. In other words, there is no agreement on what social presence actually *is* and, consequently, how it should be measured. This makes it difficult to cumulatively build on prior research, possibly explaining the conflicting findings and the rather slow progress this field of research has been making. Our publication in Educational Psychology Review, authored by Karel Kreijns, Kate Xu, and…

Aug192021 by Daniel BiedermannNo Comments

New Pub: Digital self-control interventions for distracting media multitasking – A systematic review

August 19, 2021

General education, Journal, Open access, Publication

Digital distractions can interfere with goal attainment and lead to undesirable habits that are hard to get red rid of. Various digital self-control interventions promise support to alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions. These interventions use different approaches, such as the blocking of apps and websites, goal setting, or visualizations of device usage statistics. While many apps and browser extensions make use of these features, little is known about their effectiveness. This systematic review synthesizes the current research to provide insights into the effectiveness of the different kinds of interventions. The interventions showed varying degrees of effectiveness, and especially interventions that relied purely on increasing the participants' awareness were barely effective. For those interventions that sanctioned the use of distractions, the current literature indicates that the sanctions have to…

Aug162021 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

New Pub: A short history, emerging challenges and co-operation structures for Artificial Intelligence in education

August 16, 2021

Artificial Intelligence, Higher Education, Journal, Lifelong Learning, Publication, School

To accompany the special issue in Artificial Intelligence and Education, this article presents a short history of research in the field and summarises emerging challenges. We highlight key paradigm shifts that are becoming possible but also the need to pay attention to theory, implementation and pedagogy while adhering to ethical principles. We conclude by drawing attention to international co-operation structures in the field that can support the interdiscipniary perspectives and methods required to undertake research in the area. Reference: Mavrikis, M., Cukurova, M., Di Mitri, D., Schneider, J., & Drachsler, H. (2021). A short history, emerging challenges and co-operation structures for Artificial Intelligence in education. Bildung und Erziehung 2021 74:3, 249-263. https://doi.org/10.13109/buer.2021.74.3.249.

Jul212021 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

New Pub: Literature Review on Co-Located Collaboration Modeling Using Multimodal Learning Analytics—Can We Go the Whole Nine Yards?

July 21, 2021

General education, Journal, Literature review, Multimodal Learning Analytics, Open access, Publication

Collaboration is one of the important 21st-century skills. It can take place in remote or co-located settings. Co-located collaboration (CC) is a very complex process that involves subtle human interactions that can be described with indicators like eye gaze, speaking time, pitch, and social skills from different modalities. With the advent of sensors, multimodal learning analytics has gained momentum to detect CC quality. Indicators (or low-level events) can be used to detect CC quality with the help of measurable markers (i.e., indexes composed of one or more indicators) which give the high-level collaboration process deﬁnition. However, this understanding is incomplete without considering the scenarios (such as problem solving or meetings) of CC. The scenario of CC affects the set of indicators considered: for instance, in collaborative programming, grabbing the mouse…

Jul152021 by Sebastian WollnyNo Comments

New Pub: Are We There Yet? – A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education

July 15, 2021

Artificial Intelligence, General education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Literature review, Open access, Publication

Are We There Yet? - A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education Chatbots are a promising technology with the potential to enhance workplaces and everyday life. In terms of scalability and accessibility, they also offer unique possibilities as communication and information tools for digital learning. In this work, we present a systematic literature review investigating the areas of education where chatbots have already been applied, explore the pedagogical roles of chatbots, the use of chatbots for mentoring purposes, and their potential to personalize education. We conducted a preliminary analysis of 2,678 publications to perform this literature review, which allowed us to identify 74 relevant publications for chatbots’ application in education. Through this, we address five research questions that, together, allow us to explore the current state-of-the-art of this educational…

Jul12021 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

Now online: List of EduTec Journals and Conferences

July 1, 2021

Conference, Journal, Open access, Publication

Due to popular request, we’ve pulled together a list of peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences where research into Educational Technologies and Learning Analytics is published. Although the list is surely not comprehensive, it may be used as a handy overview to learn about the breadth and diversity of this area of research as well the publication outlets that the EduTec team reads and values. The journals are sorted by the main scientific publishing houses, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Wiley, and Sage. Journals that did not fit, either because they are published by a less represented publishing house (thus, not warranting its own category) or are published by scientific societies or universities, are listed under “Other”. Besides this, we further provide info whether the journals are subscription-based or open…

May32021 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

New Pub: Towards Automatic Collaboration Analytics for Group Speech Data Using Multimodal Learning Analytics

May 3, 2021

General education, Journal, Multimodal Learning Analytics, Open access, Publication

Collaboration is an important 21st Century skill. Co-located (or face-to-face) collaboration (CC) analytics gained momentum with the advent of sensor technology. Most of these works have used the audio modality to detect the quality of CC. The CC quality can be detected from simple indicators of collaboration such as total speaking time or complex indicators like synchrony in the rise and fall of the average pitch. Most studies in the past focused on “how group members talk” (i.e., spectral, temporal features of audio like pitch) and not “what they talk”. The “what” of the conversations is more overt contrary to the “how” of the conversations. Very few studies studied “what” group members talk about, and these studies were lab based showing a representative overview of specific words as topic clusters…

Dec222020 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

New Pub: A four-country cross-case analysis of academic staff expectations about learning analytics in higher education

December 22, 2020

Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Open access, Publication

The purpose of this paper is to explore the expectations of academic staff to learning analytics services from an ideal as well as a realistic perspective. This mixed-method study focused on a cross-case analysis of staff from Higher Education Institutions from four European universities (Spain, Estonia, Netherlands, UK). While there are some differences between the countries as well as between ideal and predicted expectations, the overarching results indicate that academic staff sees learning analytics as a tool to understand the learning activities and possibility to provide feedback for the students and adapt the curriculum to meet learners' needs. However, one of the findings from the study across cases is the generally consistently low expectation and desire for academic staff to be obligated to act based on data that shows students…