Oct72026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments
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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Aug172026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments
Invited Talk at the NEES Center, Maceió, Brasil

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…
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Jun252026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments
Keynote: From Experiment to Infrastructure: Reflections on AI in Higher Education

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…
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Sep172025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments
New Pub: Design, Development and Evaluation of HILA

New Pub: Design, Development and Evaluation of HILA

Artificial Intelligence, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Publication
How can AI-supported learning analytics be integrated into educational processes in a significant way?  How can they be designed, tested and further developed to effectively improve teaching and learning practices? These questions were addressed by Hendrik Drachsler in his keynote at the Learning AID 2024 in Bochum, which has recently been published in the conference proceeding “Learning Analytics, Artificial Intelligence und Data Mining in der Hochschulbildung”. In his keynote, Hendrik stresses the importance of content-specific applications that address genuine educational needs and are supported by empirical evidence demonstrating their effectiveness. The key to fostering adaptive and sustainable learning experiences is to understand and accommodate learners’ individual needs. Hendrik argues that technological progress alone is not sufficient to improve education. His ongoing research shows that AI-supported learning analytics can only bring…
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