Andrii Vozniuk

Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-Based STEM Learning at School

Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.

Perceiving Learning at a Glance: A Systematic Literature Review of Learning Dashboard Research

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art of research on learning dashboards in the fields of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Research on learning dashboards aims to identify what data is meaningful to different stakeholders and how data can be presented to support sense-making processes. Learning dashboards are becoming popular due to the increased use of educational technologies, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The initial search of five main academic databases and GScholar resulted in 346 papers out of which 55 papers were included in the final analysis. Our review distinguishes different kinds of research studies as well as various aspects of learning dashboards and their maturity regarding evaluation. As the research field is still relatively young, most studies are exploratory and proof-of-concept. The review concludes by offering a definition for learning dashboards and by outlining open issues and future lines of work in the area of learning dashboards. There is a need for longitudinal research in authentic settings and studies that systematically compare different dashboard designs.

Towards Portable Learning Analytics Dashboards

This paper proposes a novel approach to build and deploy learning analytics dashboards in multiple learning environments. Existing learning dashboards are barely portable: once deployed on a learning platform, it requires considerable effort to deploy the dashboard elsewhere. We suggest constructing dashboards from lightweight web applications, namely widgets. Our approach allows to port dashboards with no additional cost between learning environments that implement open specifications (Open Social and Activity Streams) for data access and use widget APIs. We propose to facilitate reuse by sharing the dashboards and widgets via a centralized analytics repository.

Understanding learning at a glance: an overview of learning dashboard studies

Research on learning dashboards aims to identify what data is meaningful to different stakeholders in education, and how data can be presented to support sense-making processes. This paper summarizes the main outcomes of a systematic literature review on learning dashboards, in the fields of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. The query was run in five main academic databases and enriched with papers coming from GScholar, resulting in 346 papers out of which 55 were included in the final analysis. Our review distinguishes different kinds of research studies as well as different aspects of learning dashboards and their maturity in terms of evaluation. As the research field is still relatively young, many of the studies are exploratory and proof-of-concept. Among the main open issues and future lines of work in the area of learning dashboards, we identify the need for longitudinal research in authentic settings, as well as studies that systematically compare different dashboard design options.

Contextual learning analytics apps to create awareness in blended inquiry learning

Blended inquiry learning relying on online labs to enhance classroom activities is considered as a promising approach to increase the skills and the interest of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In such a framework where students combine face-to-face interaction with peers or teachers and online interaction with remote or virtual labs, adequate guidance should be provided. Such a task is facilitated if teachers are made aware of the progresses and the difficulties of their students. Learning analytics based on the analysis of the student online interaction traces and their visualization is an adequate mean. A set of contextual learning analytics apps which provide the teacher with learning-specific information is introduced in this paper. A requirement analysis gathered at a summer school with 32 teachers, the design and implementation of three contextual learning analytics apps, the main outcomes from a case study, as well as an outlook on future research avenues are detailed.

A Flexible and Extendable Learning Analytics Infrastructure

Currently architectures for learning analytics infrastructures are being developed in different contexts. While some approaches are designed for specific types of learning environments like learning management systems (LMS) or are restricted to specific analysis tasks, general solutions for learning analytics infrastructures are still underrepresented in current research. This paper describes the design of a flexible and extendable architecture for a learning analytics infrastructure which incorporates different analytics aspects such as data storage, feedback mechanisms, and analysis algorithms. The described infrastructure relies on loosely coupled software agents that can perform different analytics task independently. Hence, it is possible to extend the analytic functionality by just adding new agent components. Furthermore, it is possible for existing analytics systems to access data and use infrastructure components as a service. As a case study, this paper describes the application of the proposed infrastructure as part of the learning analytics services in a large scale web-based platform for inquiry-based learning with online laboratories.

Speakup in the classroom: anonymous temporary social media for better interactions

Student participation in class is an important aspect of the learning experience, and can provide valuable feedback for teachers. However, getting students to interact in large classrooms is challenging. This paper presents SpeakUp, a mobile temporary social media app, confined in time and space that aims to improve interactions in classrooms. In SpeakUp, teachers can create temporary chat rooms accessible to students located nearby. Students can then anonymously post messages, which can be rated up or down by others. Our evaluation results (with a class of 300 students over the course of a semester) show that temporary social media can be used as an effective tool to improve classroom interactions by providing: (i) confined classroom-like here & now interactions to foster adoption, (ii) anonymity to increase participation and (iii) social media rating for highlighting interesting content. Students appear to use SpeakUp not solely for asking questions but also as a general backchannel, which can result in spam.

SpeakUp --- A Mobile App Facilitating Audience Interaction

A dynamic student-teacher interaction during class is an important part of the learning experience. However, in regular class settings and especially in large classrooms, it is a challenging task to encourage students to participate as they tend to be intimidated by the size of the audience. In this paper, in order to overcome this issue, we present SpeakUp, a novel context-aware mobile application supporting the social interactions between speakers and audiences through anonymous messaging and a peer rating mechanism. Context-awarness is achieved by bounding interactions in space and time using location-based authorization and message boards with limited lifetime. Anonymity is used as an icebreaker, so students dare writing down any question that pops in their heads. Peer rating is used to make it easy for teachers to access the most relevant ones and address them. We performed an evaluation with 140 students over five four-hour lessons that indicate that SpeakUp is easy to use and is perceived as useful.

Graspeo: a social media platform for knowledge management in NGOs

Timely access to critical information is crucial for any organization operating in situations of emergency. Deploying an adequate information system tailored to specific organizational needs and matched to the organizational structure is essential. To understand the knowledge management needs of Médecins Sans Frontières, one of the leading NGOs in the humanitarian and medical fields, we conducted in total 145 hours of in-depth interviews. This paper presents three identified key requirements for an effective knowledge management system specifically designed for large distributed NGOs, like MSF. Additionally, we introduce a novel social media called Graspeo designed and built from ground up to fulfill these requirements.

Orchestrating Inquiry-Based Learning Spaces: An Analysis of Teacher Needs

The European Go-Lab project offers Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) as open educational resources to support Inquiry-based Learning (IBL). To successfully exploit ILSs and implement IBL, proper support for orchestration is needed. Researchers have highlighted the complexity of orchestrating Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) scenarios and the need for supporting participants in this endeavour. In this paper, we address this issue by analyzing the teacher needs when orchestrating IBL and relying on ILSs. Concretely, we have carried out a survey-based study with 23 expert teachers in IBL and four in-depth case studies in authentic classroom scenarios with 2 teachers. The results lead us to a set of needs to be covered regarding the design of the ILS, the learning process and the learning outcomes.