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

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

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…
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Best Short Paper Award Nomination @LAK23

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,…
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New Pub: Students’ expectations of Learning Analytics across Europe

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…
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Book Chapter – A Trusted Learning Analytics Dashboard for Displaying OER

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…
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New Pub: Effective Use of Learner-Generated Data in Teacher Training Activities

New Pub: Effective Use of Learner-Generated Data in Teacher Training Activities

Learning Analytics, Publication, Report, Webinar
How can data be utilized in teacher training in an effective and ethical manner? This question was addressed by Hendrik Drachsler, 3 teacher trainers and the European Schoolnet Academy team at the webinar “Effective Use of Data in Teacher Training” held on the 18th and 19th of January 2023. One of the main focuses of the webinar was the newly-published report "Effective Use of Learner-Generated Data in Teacher Training Activities", written by Hendrik Drachsler. The report presents an overview of the concepts and applications of learner-generated data (learning analytics) and gives potential training scenarios for teacher training programs. Feel free to check out this report to learn more about learning analytics and how this has been and can be used in training: Effective Use of Learner-Generated Data in Teacher Training…
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New Pub: Causal Inference and Bias in Learning Analytics

New Pub: Causal Inference and Bias in Learning Analytics

Journal, Learning Analytics, Literature review, Open access, Publication, Research Methods
Learning Analytics is an applied field of research with the goal of producing actionable knowledge to improve student learning. This requires knowledge about cause-and-effect. However, randomized experiments, the usual vehicle for causality, are not always feasible nor desirable. Researchers are then left with observational data, from which they are, understandably, hesitant to draw causal inferences. Fortunately, there has been a lot of progress on the topic of causality in the last two decades. One prominent framework uses Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to graphically reason about cause-and-effect and/or bias. This primer, authored by Joshua Weidlich, Dragan Gasevic, and Hendrik Drachsler, published in the Journal of Learning Analytics, introduces DAGs to Learning Analytics.  Using fictitious and published examples, we show how DAGs are a principled approach to a) improve causal inferences for…
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Presentation: Atezaz participated in the ICDLE conference and presented a new publication

Presentation: Atezaz participated in the ICDLE conference and presented a new publication

Artificial Intelligence, Conference, Conference, Feedback, Further Education, Learning Analytics, Lifelong Learning, Open access, Publication, Self-Regulation
Our paper titled "Caught in the Lifelong Learning Maze: Helping People with Learning Analytics and Chatbots to Find Personal Career Paths" was accepted at the 13th International Conference on Distance Learning and Education (ICDLE 2022) held at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Atezaz Ahmad participated in the conference and presented their publication. The article will be published (open access) in the International Journal of Information and Education Technology. Abstract: Current lifelong learning platforms offer users a query option to select a wide variety of courses. However, finding a suitable course among the seemingly endless catalogs of options presented by the platforms is not straightforward. We argue that digital counseling can enhance this process. In this paper, we present a set of three formative studies where we explored the main aspects…
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New Pub: Untangling connections between challenges in the adoption of learning analytics in higher education

New Pub: Untangling connections between challenges in the adoption of learning analytics in higher education

Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Publication
[caption id="attachment_4599" align="alignnone" width="967"] Associations of challenges and ethics: (a) none, (b) prep-partial, and (c) full adoption institutions[/caption] Potential benefits of learning analytics (LA) for improving students' performance, predicting students' success, and enhancing teaching and learning practice have increasingly been recognized in higher education. However, the adoption of LA in higher education institutions (HEIs) to date remains sporadic and predominantly small in scale due to several socio-technical challenges. To better understand why HEIs struggle to scale LA adoption, it is needed to untangle adoption challenges and their related factors. This paper presents the findings of a study that sought to investigate the associations of adoption factors with challenges HEIs face in the adoption of LA and how these associations are compared among HEIs at different scopes of adoption. The study…
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New Pub: Effect of social support features via buddies in app-based habit building

New Pub: Effect of social support features via buddies in app-based habit building

Conference, Publication
During 10-12 October 2022 at the World Conference on Mobile, Blended and Seamless Learning (mLearn), the full paper "Effect of social support features via buddies in app-based habit building" was presented. The paper will also appear in the mLearn 2022 proceedings. The authors of the paper are Daniel Biedermann, Patrick Schwarz, Jane Yau and Hendrik Drachsler. The abstract is as follows: App-based habit building has been shown to be a good tool for building desired habits, however it is unclear how much individual features that are present in many apps contribute to the success of habit building. In this paper, the authors consider the influence of social support features by developing an app in which habit progress was shared with peers. In the study, 38 participants created habits and monitored…
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