Special issue: Adoption of learning technologies in times of pandemic crisis

Special issue: Adoption of learning technologies in times of pandemic crisis

Publication, Special Issue
Despite the promises made and the many and varied national and international projects to adopt and roll out new educational technologies and interventions for elementary, secondary, and higher education, long-lasting institutional technology adoption has been hampered by a lack of continuous funding and resources to achieve the continued buy-in of stakeholders. The real impact of daily learning and teaching practices has been rather small and quickly fades out after a project has been completed. The COVID-19 crisis forced all education providers to move their complete teaching concepts online. This rapid change was also coined as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). In this Special Issue, we put a finger on the pulse of this rapid change from traditional to ERT and online learning. We aimed to collect empirical data about behavioural and…
Read More
New Pub: Designing the Learning Analytics Cockpit – A Dashboard that Enables Interventions

New Pub: Designing the Learning Analytics Cockpit – A Dashboard that Enables Interventions

Conference, Conference, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Publication
This paper presents results from our design and evaluation studies of the Learning Analytics Cockpit (LA Cockpit) for a quiz app, which aims to provide lecturers with important information about students’ knowledge levels. We define a LA Cockpit as a tool for instructors that enables them to steer students’ learning process by providing a LA Dashboard which visualizes students’ learning indicators and an intervention feature enabling instructors to give feedback based on students’ knowledge levels. To address the needs of lecturers we applied the Double Diamond (DD) design process model which consists of four stages: discover, define, develop & refine. Following the DD process, we first conducted a qualitative study by interviewing four lecturers and student teachers to discover their needs. Results from the interviews allowed us to define requirements…
Read More
New Pub: Virtual Academic Conferences as Learning Spaces

New Pub: Virtual Academic Conferences as Learning Spaces

Journal, Publication
The COVID-19 outbreak came with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how the new reality of social distancing and limited international travel will affect the organization of academic conferences. Drawing on conceptualization of academic conferences as professional learning spaces, in this study, we examine the factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual academic conferences and how such perceptions differ between participants from different research fields. The aim was to gain knowledge about factors that should be considered when designing a virtual conference. Survey data from participants of three different virtual conferences were collected (N = 311). Kendall's rank correlation and χ2-analyses were performed. Results show satisfaction with social interaction, the extent to which presentations met participants' topics of interest and the perceived importance of learning and getting an overview on the…
Read More
Keynote at SITE Interactive

Keynote at SITE Interactive

Conference, Keynote
Dr Daniele Di Mitri was invited to deliver a keynote at the SITE Interactive online conference 2021 Keynote on "Restoring Context in Online Teaching with Artificial Intelligence and Multimodal Learning Experiences". The keynote paper to be published in the proceedings of the conference on the Learning & Technology Library Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic forced more than 1.6 billion learners out of school, becoming the most challenging disruption ever endured by the global education systems. In many countries, education institutions decided to move their regular activities online, opting for remote teaching as an emergency solution to continue their education. Meanwhile, physical distancing and learning in isolation are heavily challenging learners and hindering their study success. There is a compelling need to make education systems more resilient and less vulnerable to future…
Read More
New Pub: Einfluss von Lehr-Einstellungen und digitalen Kompetenzen auf die virtuelle Lehre

New Pub: Einfluss von Lehr-Einstellungen und digitalen Kompetenzen auf die virtuelle Lehre

Competence development, Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Open access, Publication
Die Gestaltung und Durchführung virtueller Lehrveranstaltungen wird durch unter schiedliche Lehransätze der Hochschullehrenden sowie durch deren individuellen Kompetenzstand auf dem Feld digitaler (Lehr-)Kompetenzen beeinflusst. Der Bei trag stellt empirische Ergebnisse einer Studie vor, die zeigen, dass insbesondere ein studierendenzentrierter Lehransatz bei Gestaltung virtueller Lehre vorteilhaft ist und der Aufbau digitaler Kompetenzen einen Schlüssel für die gelingende Im plementierung digitaler Bildungsformate darstellt. Abschließend werden mögliche Folgerungen für mediendidaktische Qualifizierungsansätze diskutiert. The design and implementation of virtual courses are influenced by different teaching by different teaching approaches of university lecturers and by their individual level of competence in the field of digital (teaching) skills. This empirical results of a study, which show that in particular, a student-centred a student-centred approach to virtual teaching is particularly advantageous and that the development of digital competencies is a…
Read More
New Pub: Personality and Social Presence

New Pub: Personality and Social Presence

Higher Education, Journal, Publication
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,…
Read More
Consortium meeting and research workshop of the HELA project

Consortium meeting and research workshop of the HELA project

Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Meta-study, Project, Workshop
On October 22st, 2021, Hendrik Drachsler contributed to the HELA project. Prof. Nina Begičević Ređep PhD, presented activities and results achieved in the seven months of project implementation and give an overview of upcoming research activities due to the end of the first project year. The HELA partners have set up a powerful machine learning literature review system and will focus on providing insights through meta-analysis on ethics & privacy, LA use cases, strategic planning for the adoption of learning analytics. On Friday, October 22nd, 2021, a research workshop will be held where the FOI team will present project results through three modules: 1) Conceptual framework of learning analytics (LA), 2) Strategic planning and decision making related to LA implementation and 3) LA use cases. After this, external associate Prof.…
Read More
New Pub: EDMEDIA 2021 Conference Paper

New Pub: EDMEDIA 2021 Conference Paper

Conference, Learning Analytics, Publication
Our conference article has been published at EDMEDIA 2021 relating to the preliminary findings based on a systematic review on teaching analytics (see abstract below) and we are currently working on extending these findings for a journal article…… Title: Utilising learning analytics for teaching success Authors: Jane Yau & Dirk Ifenthaler Abstract: Learning analytics are utilized to support learners’ educational needs as well as to enhance their study success, for example, via the use of real-time prompts, motivational dashboards, appropriate learning interventions, which have been shown to increase students’ academic performance as well as their course retention rates. The combination of student, learning and curriculum profiles consisting of static and dynamic parameters enable analytics to be computed and academic interventions to take place. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic…
Read More
New Pub: Mobile Sensing with Smart Wearables of the Physical Context of Distance Learning Students to Consider Its Effects on Learning

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

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