New Pub: Emotional and motivational effects of automated and personalized feedback

New Pub: Emotional and motivational effects of automated and personalized feedback

Computer-supported collaborative learning, Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, New Pub, Open access
With increasingly large student numbers, providing personalized teacher feedback becomes untenable. On the other hand, providing students feedback about their work is an integral part of ensuring student support throughout their learning trajectory. Fortunately, Learning Analytics now makes it feasible to automatically deploy feedback to many students at once. However, the design of effective feedback still remains an area of investigation Joshua Weidlich, Aron Fink, Ioana Jivet, Jane Yau, Tornike Giorgashvili, Hendrik Drachsler, and Andreas Frey's recently published paper in the Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning focused on one key design feature: the reference frame. Any feedback content must be formulated in reference to some performance level, be it the average of the student group (social comparison), the desired performance level (criterion-referenced comparison), or past performance. A longstanding literature on this…
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FoLA supports Simulation-based Training for High-risk Clinical Situations

FoLA supports Simulation-based Training for High-risk Clinical Situations

Assessment, Empirical Study, Feedback, Further Education, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, medical education, Multimodal Learning Analytics, Workshop
From May 16th to 17th, 2024, Hendrik Drachsler and Marcel Schmitz (TETRA AI, ZUYD University of Applied Science) had the pleasure of providing a FoLA workshop at the College of Anaesthesiologists of Ireland (CAI) in Dublin, Ireland, under the support of the Insight research centre. Together with members from CAI and from the ASSERT Centre, College of Medicine and Health, University College Cork (UCC), they used the FoLA tool to plan a simulation-based training for high-risk clinical situations using highly informative feedback. Data from these trainings will be collected and analyzed to determine how effective this training is in improving the performance of the attendees. The study is being planned to take place with around 100 doctors in training at two simulation training centers: at ASSERT Centre UCC and at…
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New Pub: Feedback sources in essay writing: peer-generated or AI-generated feedback?

New Pub: Feedback sources in essay writing: peer-generated or AI-generated feedback?

Artificial Intelligence, Empirical Study, Feedback, Further Education, Journal, Publication
A newly published article discusses the use of peer feedback as a learning strategy, particularly in large classes where teachers face heavy workloads. For complex tasks like writing argumentative essays, peers may struggle to provide high-quality feedback due to the cognitive demands involved. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, like ChatGPT, raises the question of whether AI can serve as a new feedback source for such tasks. To investigate this, a study compared ChatGPT-generated feedback with peer feedback on argumentative essays written by 74 graduate students from a Dutch university. The study collected essay data, peer feedback and ChatGPT-generated feedback, and then analyzed them using coding schemes. Results showed significant differences between ChatGPT and peer feedback, with ChatGPT offering more descriptive feedback while peers focused on identifying essay problems.…
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Didacta Presentation in Cologne: Key Questions to Find Fitting AI Solutions For Student Feedback

Didacta Presentation in Cologne: Key Questions to Find Fitting AI Solutions For Student Feedback

Artificial Intelligence, Feedback, General education, Invited talk, School
What are the goals of AI in education for student feedback? How can teachers make sure that their AI-assisted feedback goes beyond simple right/wrong statements and instead provides not only correct solutions, but also possibilities for improvement, hints on competence development and effective learning strategies? To find a fitting AI solution, there are key questions one should know to ask in advance. These questions were outlined by Hendrik Drachsler in his presentation at the didacta 2024 in Cologne on 20.02.2024 titled “Ihr KI-Anbieter-Test - 3 Schlüsselfragen die Sie kennen sollten.” The key questions: Question 1: What indicators does your AI product use to analyze learning outcomes? --> Look for AI products that provide relevant indicators for measuring learning progress and skills acquisition. These indicators are important to accurately assess learning…
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New Pub: From the Automated Assessment of Student Essay Content to Highly Informative Feedback: a Case Study

New Pub: From the Automated Assessment of Student Essay Content to Highly Informative Feedback: a Case Study

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Computational Psychometrics, Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Publication, Special Issue, Technical paper
How can we give students highly informative feedback on their essays using natural language processing? In our new paper, led by Sebastian Gombert, we present a case study on using GBERT and T5 models to generate feedback for educational psychology students. In this paper: ➡ We implemented a two-step pipeline that segments the essays and predicts codes from the segments. The codes are used to generate feedback texts informing the students about the correctness of their solutions and the content areas they need to improve. ➡ We used 689 manually labelled essays as training data for our models. We compared GBERT, T5, and bag-of-words baselines for both steps. The results showed that the transformer-based models outperformed the baselines in both steps. ➡ We evaluated the feedback with a learner cohort…
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Enhancing Learning with Data-enriched Activities: Insights from the HIKOF/IMPACT Workshop at eLearning Netzwerktag 2023

Enhancing Learning with Data-enriched Activities: Insights from the HIKOF/IMPACT Workshop at eLearning Netzwerktag 2023

Conference, Event, Feedback, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Project, Workshop
At the 16te eLearning Netzwerktag 2023, participants had the opportunity to engage in various thought-provoking workshops. One workshop that stood out was the HIKOF/IMPACT session, where the edutec.science members from these AI projects shed light on the development of Data-enriched Learning Activities (DeLAs). This interactive workshop showcased how DeLAs offer valuable insights into students' competency development within digital learning activities. Let's delve into the details of how the HIKOF/IMPACT projects, part of the HILA research program, are revolutionizing eLearning through the implementation of DeLAs. The HIKOF/IMPACT workshop focused on exploring the concept and implementation of Data-enriched Learning Activities. Through DeLAs, educators gain unique insights into students' competency development during digital learning processes. These activities represent a powerful approach that leverages AI to analyze real-time data and provide highly informative feedback…
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16th eLearning Netzwerktag: An Insightful Recap of the Fast-Paced Year

16th eLearning Netzwerktag: An Insightful Recap of the Fast-Paced Year

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Augmented Reality, Competence development, Computational Psychometrics, Computer-supported collaborative learning, Conference, Event, Feedback, Gender, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Learning Design
The annual eLearning Netzwerktag was a highly anticipated one-day event where the eLearning community of Frankfurt and the surrounding areas gathered to present the highlights of the past year to the public. On November 21, 2023, the event took place at Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Among the speakers, the Prof. Dr. Maren Scheffel, Prof. Dr. Franziska Matthäus , CIO of Goethe University Ulrich Schielein, Prof. Dr.Hendrik Drachsler, Director of studiumdigitale, delivered an opening speech that reflected on an incredible year, with a particular focus on the advancements in generative Artificial Intelligence applications. Hendrik Drachsler's speech highlighted the significant developments in the field of digital learning. At the previous Netzwerktag, applications like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stablediffusions, and open language models (LLMs) such as LAMA were relatively unknown to most…
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Keynote on Highly Informative Feedback with AI @ University of Bremen

Keynote on Highly Informative Feedback with AI @ University of Bremen

Artificial Intelligence, Event, Feedback, Higher Education, Invited talk, Learning Analytics, Learning Design
On November 29, 2023, the University of Bremen invited Hendrik Drachsler to deliver a keynote on AI and Learning Analytics in higher education. Hendrik presented the work of edutec.science and studiumdigitale, highlighting their advancements, challenges, and the future prospects of integrating AI-based systems for learning and teaching. The keynote shed light on the theoretical foundations, practical implications, and the importance of ethical considerations when harnessing the power of AI in education. During his speech, Hendrik acknowledged the significance of units like studiumdigitale, the central innovation unit for Technology-Enhanced Learning and Teaching at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He explained the SMS transfer process (Scouting-Maturing-Service transfer process) and its role in shaping the EdTech ecosystem of the university. Hendrik emphasized the impact of learning analytics—an emerging field that utilizes data to…
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New Pub: Development and initial validation of an instrument to measure student feedback literacy

New Pub: Development and initial validation of an instrument to measure student feedback literacy

Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Open access, Publication
To ensure quality higher education, students should routinely receive feedback on their academic endeavors. Alongside the question of what makes feedback effective, there is also an emerging research literature about empowering students to understand and utilize that feedback effectively. These abilities and attitudes of students have recently been subsumed under the concept of feedback literacy. The concept of feedback literacy was conceived by Carless and Boud (2018) as “the understandings, capacities, and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies.” Since then, a vibrant research literature has developed theoretical frameworks, explored dimensions of feedback literacy, and investigated whether feedback literacy can systematically be enhanced, etc. However, what is still missing are larger-scale rigorous investigations of the extent to which feedback literacy actually…
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Reflecting on the 8th National AI in Schools Conference: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Reflecting on the 8th National AI in Schools Conference: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Artificial Intelligence, Conference, Event, Feedback, Invited talk, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Project, School, Transfer Activity
The 8th National Conference on AI in Schools, held in Berlin, was a momentous event that gathered experts, policy-makers, and educators to discuss the current landscape and future prospects of AI in education. If there’s one word to describe the atmosphere at the 8th National Conference on AI in Schools, it would be “transformative“. The conference was not only setting high standards on political representatives, researchers in the field of educational & computer science, but also charged with representatives school supervisory boards, state institutes, and offices for teacher education in all 16 federal states. Overall, there was a palpable spirit of collaboration, optimism, and let”s get things done. Politicians, researchers, and practitioners were engaged and committed, staying until the very end of the event, signalling an overwhelming willingness to bring…
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