News - Page 9 of 38 - EduTec Science

Jul92024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

Successful PhD Defense: Understanding Self-Regulated Learning in Blended Learning Environments

Learning Analytics, PhD defense, School, Self-Regulation

On the 28th of June Hendrik Drachsler had the honor of being a jury member for the PhD defense of Esteban Villalobos at the University of Toulouse. Esteban successfully defended his thesis titled “Developing a Learning Analytics framework to understand the temporal behavior of students in Blended Learning Environments“. Especially in Blended Learning (BL) settings, Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is crucial for student success. These environments require students to manage their learning not only in online, but also in traditional in-person activities. Esteban’s thesis advances our understanding of SRL in BL contexts through a comprehensive approach, using Learning Analytics (LA) techniques as well as the latest Sequence Analysis (SA) advancements to examine students’ behaviors via trace data and self-reported measures. One of the main goals of his thesis is the manifestation…

Jul22024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New pub: Potentials and Challenges of Generative AI in Instruction and Research on Instruction

Artificial Intelligence, Feedback, General education, Journal, New Pub, School

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming such a part of our daily lives that soon it will be almost impossible to imagine life without it. Especially since the emergence of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, endless new possibilities have arisen for the usage of AI in many areas, especially in educational settings. Currently, the effective use of AI in education, both in teaching and learning, remains largely undefined, as do its limitations. We are also missing clarity regarding the potential benefits of AI for instructional research and the ethical boundaries of its use in this field. The opportunities and challenges associated with integrating AI into educational practices and research are explored in a newly published article from Hendrik Drachsler, Knut Neumann and Jochen Kuhn. In their paper they identify specific…

Jul12024 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

New pub: Predicting Item Difficulty and Item Response Time with Scalar-mixed Transformer Encoder Models and Rational Network Regression Heads

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Computational Psychometrics, Conference, Higher Education, Publication, Workshop

In a contribution to the BEA 2024 Shared Task, we addressed the challenge of predicting the difficulty and response time of multiple-choice questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examination® (USMLE®). This exam is an important assessment for medical professionals. To predict these variables, we evaluated various BERT-like pre-trained transformer models. We combined these models with Scalar Mixing and two custom 2-layer classification heads, using learnable Rational Activations as the activation function. This multi-task setup allowed us to predict both item difficulty and response time. The results were noteworthy. Our models placed first out of 43 participants in predicting item difficulty and fifth out of 34 participants in predicting item response time. This demonstrates the potential of advanced AI techniques in improving the evaluation processes of critical exams like the…

Jun142024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

Planetary Hopes: C3S der GU Seeks Solutions to Planetary Polycrisis

Citizens science, Digitalisation, Event, Research Methods

[caption id="attachment_6561" align="alignright" width="300"] Wissenschaftsminister Gremmels taucht per VR-Brille in die Geologie des Naturparks Kellerwald-Edersee ein; Foto: Uwe Dettmar[/caption] Global warming is causing sea levels to rise, making coastal cities uninhabitable. The earth’s biodiversity is being lost and the changing climatic conditions are causing species to migrate to new areas, both of which are transforming the agriculture landscape. Humans and their economic activities are contributing to these changes, which are referred to as planetary polycrises. There is still much to be learned about how these phenomena are connected to each other and how we humans and our economic practices contribute to them. Of essential significance is the unanswered question of what we can do to address these crises. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Challenges The Center for Critical Computational Studies…

Jun112024 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

The final Consortial Meeting of the MILKI-PSY Project was held in Cologne

Event, New Pub, Project meeting

At the end of May, all project partners of the Multimodal Immersive Learning with Artificial Intelligence for Psychomotor Skills (MILKI-PSY) project convened for the concluding session at the Cologne Game Lab and the German Sport University in Cologne. The project's aim was to develop artificial intelligence-supported, data-driven, multimodal, immersive learning environments for the autonomous acquisition of psychomotor skills. The research outcomes and their corresponding learning tools underwent evaluation. These included a virtual learning environment developed to facilitate the training process, innovative feedback methods to learn and refine movements, and the creation of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications for sports such as golf, dancing, and running. Furthermore, virtual learning scenarios were devised for collaborative tasks with a robot in assembly work. It was demonstrated that innovative, immersive learning environments could…

Jun112024 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

GREAT project posters presentations at IEEE Games, Entertainment & Media Conference

Conference

Jane Yau was at the IEEE Games, Entertainment and Media Conference last week in Torino, Italy (5-7 June), and shared GREAT project findings - 📢Co-designing Pilot Games with Citizens and Policy Stakeholders to Increase Climate Action 📌This paper presents an initial report on the codesign processes between researchers and policy stakeholders in the GREAT (Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation) project applied in the context of the climate emergency. 📢 Exploring the Concept of Mini Data Sprints as a Methodology to Assess Data Validity and Stimulate Climate Conversation 📌 The authors present two studies that have deployed mini data sprints (MDS). The MDS approach uses interactive data applications and visualisations to provoke citizens’ feelings, knowledge, and perspectives towards the climate conversation and presented data. These studies highlight how the MDS…

Jun102024 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

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…

May292024 by Atezaz AhmadNo Comments

Last HIKOF-Beiratsmeeting & Project Wrap-Up 2021-2024

Project

On 13.5.24, HIKOF project members – Hendrik, Jane, Josh, Sebastian G. (DIPF), Andreas Frey, Aron Fink (GU Psychology), Tornike and Thorsten (GU Studiumdigitale) met members of the HIKOF-Beirat online to share final project results. The project has been running for the past three years from May 2021 and has officially ended in May 2024. In 2022, we completed our pilot study, and in 2023, our evaluation study with ca. 1000 students in a Teacher Education course at Goethe University, where we collected (with students' consent) information relating to their motivation and emotions before and after they had completed their assignments. We constructed some machine learning models for automatically assessing the assignments in order to reduce lecturers' workload. Finally, we provided highly-informative competence driven feedback to students and also collected their…

May242024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

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…

May212024 by Gianluca RomanoNo Comments

How to Implement and Scale Learning Analytics Infrastructures in the Cloud @ #JTELSS24

Critical Online Reasoning, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Summer School, Workshop

At the 18th EATEL Summer School on Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTELSS 2024) in Gabicce Mare, Pesaro, Italy, Gianluca Romano and Sebastian Gombert conducted the workshop "From Learner Behavior to Big Data: How to Implement and Scale Learning Analytics Infrastructures in the Cloud”. In the ever-evolving world of cloud computing, Azure stands out as a robust platform offering a myriad of services and tools to help businesses innovate and scale. Recently, we had the chance to delve deep into Azure's ecosystem, exploring its billing structures, infrastructure capabilities, and budgeting models. Here's a glimpse into what we learned and how you can leverage Azure for tracking user behavior and managing costs effectively. One of the foundational aspects of working with Azure is understanding its billing structure, which is organized into tenants, subscriptions, and…