News

HIKOF-DL Presentation at the University Future Festival

HIKOF-DL Presentation at the University Future Festival

Conference, Event
  Jane, as the project-coordinator, presented HIKOF-DL in the Track - AI & Technology, at the University Future Festival on 27.4.2023. Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, we made use of artificial intelligence and learning analytics technologies for both lecturers’ and students’ online teaching and learning gains. Using these technologies, the team designed and implemented novel ways of providing highly-informative competence driven feedback (hicof) to large classes of university students (≈1000) for three innovative online assignments. We built machine learning models to automatically assess the assignments and reduced the time required for staff to manually grade them. High-informative feedback provides correct solutions, possibilities for improvement, hints on self-regulation and effective learning strategies (Wisniewski, Zierer and Hattie, 2020; Winne & Hadwin, 2008), and on two different levels - Feed Up (concerning their understanding of the learning goal) and Feed Forward (concerning their next steps in their learning process) (Hattie & Timberley, 2007). Competence driven feedback is feedback that is given to students based on…
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HIKOF-DL – 4th Committee Meeting with Industry Members

HIKOF-DL – 4th Committee Meeting with Industry Members

Event, Transfer Activity
The fourth Committee meeting with industry members of the research project "HIKOF-DL" took place on March 31, 2023. HIKOF-DL is a project funded by the Hessen Ministerium für Digital Strategie und Entwicklung, which aims to provide high-informative feedback for a large number of university students, and automatic assessment, in order to reduce the lecturers' workload. The meeting yielded exciting results and discussions, showcasing the progress and potential of this innovative study. The meeting kicked off with an introduction by Prof. Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, who emphasized the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Dr. Joshua Weidlich, a key researcher in the project, then presented the research design of the study. The study population was divided into an experimental group and a control group to investigate two aspects: how students respond…
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CORE: New project investigates students’ critical use of digital media

CORE: New project investigates students’ critical use of digital media

Assessment, Digitalisation, Higher Education, Project, Research topic, Target group
Students are increasingly using information from the Internet to learn for their studies. According to recent surveys, they even cite the Internet as their main source when searching for learning materials. Research shows that students often rely on inappropriate, irrelevant and scientifically unsupported sources when searching the web. Little is known about exactly how self-directed learning takes place on the Internet and how information is selected and processed. This will now be addressed by the new research group "Kritisches Denken in Online-Lernumgebungen in der Hochschulbildung (CORE)” (Critical Thinking in Online Learning Environments in Higher Education), which is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with more than 5 million euros over the next four years. The CORE project will investigate the critical use of digital media and information among…
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Visit from Sasha Poquet

Visit from Sasha Poquet

Digitalisation, Higher Education, Invited talk, Learning Analytics, Research topic
On April 13th, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Dr. Oleksandra (Sasha) Poquet, professor in learning analytics at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich, to our EduTec group in Frankfurt. The visit provided a valuable opportunity for the EduTec group to learn from Sasha's research experience and explore the future of educational technology. The visit began with an introduction by Hendrik Drachsler, who provided an overview of our current research and ongoing projects. This was followed by a presentation by Oleksandra Poquet, who discussed her current, present and future research. In the past, Sasha's research focused on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the impact of homophily on university course enrollment. She also discussed her work on Modelling Digital Networks with…
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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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Reelection in the Executive Committee of SoLAR

Reelection in the Executive Committee of SoLAR

Learning Analytics, Team
Ioana Jivet has been reelected to the Executive Committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) for another mandate of two years 2023-2025. The Executive committee governs the society's work and meets regularly to decide on matters of policy, general business, the tabling of reports from any Committee and any other matter that requires the Executive’s decision-making powers. The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) is an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers who are exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development. SoLAR has been active in organizing the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) and the Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI), launching multiple initiatives to support collaborative and open research around learning analytics, promoting the publication and dissemination of learning analytics research, and advising and…
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Highly Informative LA Workshop at LAK23

Highly Informative LA Workshop at LAK23

Conference, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Workshop
On the 13th of March 2023, as part of the LAK23 conference, five EduTec team members (Daniele Di Mitri, Ioana Jivet, Sebastian Gombert, Atezaz Ahmad and Hendrik Drachsler) organised a full-day workshop on Highly Informative Learning Analytics with Marcel Schmitz from Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. In this workshop, we investigated the concept of highly informative learning analytics and proposed a methodology for designing an environment that delivers highly informative learning analytics. The workshop is intended as a hands-on, interactive session that allows participants to test the methodology’s potential in a realistic use case. The proposed approach is based on the four-stage process of the Design Cycle for Education (DC4E). We exemplify practical tools that were designed in-house for each stage, including a tool to support teachers while…
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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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Dissemination event for the AFELK project

Dissemination event for the AFELK project

Event, Feedback, Project, Project meeting, Research topic, School, Target group
Digital lessons can help track individual student learning progression, analyze the extent to which they are productive and report this information back to teachers. But how can this individual learning progression and the learning difficulties that arise in the process be depicted? The research project AFLEK "Analyse und Förderung von Lernverläufen zur Entwicklung von Kompetenzen" (Analysis and Support of Learning Trajectories for the Development of Competencies) is currently looking for answers to this issue. The interdisciplinary project team uses so-called teacher dashboards to provide physics teachers with almost real-time feedback on the learning progress of their students. The information from digital teaching units helps identify productive and unproductive learning progression; this information can then help to automatically recolonize learning difficulties und derive feedback for the teachers to support more productive…
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