Annika Wolff

Improving retention: predicting at-risk students by analysing clicking behaviour in a virtual learning environment

One of the key interests for learning analytics is how it can be used to improve retention. This paper focuses on work conducted at the Open University (OU) into predicting students who are at risk of failing their module. The Open University is one of the worlds largest distance learning institutions. Since tutors do not interact face to face with students, it can be difficult for tutors to identify and respond to students who are struggling in time to try to resolve the difficulty. Predictive models have been developed and tested using historic Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) activity data combined with other data sources, for three OU modules. This has revealed that it is possible to predict student failure by looking for changes in users activity in the VLE, when compared against their own previous behaviour, or that of students who can be categorised as having similar learning behaviour. More focused analysis of these modules applying the GUHA (General Unary Hypothesis Automaton) method of data analysis has also yielded some early promising results for creating accurate hypothesis about students who fail.

Storyspace: a story-driven approach for creating museum narratives

In a curated exhibition of a museum or art gallery, a selection of heritage objects and associated information is presented to a visitor for the purpose of telling a story about them. The same underlying story can be presented in a number of different ways. This paper describes techniques for creating multiple alternative narrative structures from a single underlying story, by selecting different organising principles for the events and plot structures of the story. These authorial decisions can produce different dramatic effects. Storyspace is a web interface to an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. We describe how the narrative component of the Storyspace software can produce multiple narratives from the underlying stories and plots of curated exhibitions. Based on the curators choice, the narrative module suggests a coherent ordering for the events of a story and its associated heritage objects. Narratives constructed through Storyspace can be tailored to suit different audiences and can be presented in different forms, such as physical exhibitions, museum tours, leaflets and catalogues, or as online experiences.

Predicting Student Performance from Combined Data Sources

This chapter will explore the use of predictive modeling methods for identifying students who will benefit most from tutor interventions. This is a growing area of research and is especially useful in distance learning where tutors and students do not meet face to face. The methods discussed will include decision-tree classification, support vector machine (SVM), general unary hypotheses automaton (GUHA), Bayesian networks, and linear and logistic regression. These methods have been trialed through building and testing predictive models using data from several Open University (OU) modules. The Open University offers a good test-bed for this work, as it is one of the largest distance learning institutions in Europe. The chapter will discuss how the predictive capacity of the different sources of data changes as the course progresses. It will also highlight the importance of understanding how a student’s pattern of behavior changes during the course.

Curate and storyspace: an ontology and web-based environment for describing curatorial narratives

Existing metadata schemes and content management systems used by museums focus on describing the heritage objects that the museum holds in its collection. These are used to manage and describe individual heritage objects according to properties such as artist, date and preservation requirements. Curatorial narratives, such as physical or online exhibitions tell a story that spans across heritage objects and have a meaning that does not necessarily reside in the individual heritage objects themselves. Here we present curate, an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. This draws on structuralist accounts that distinguish the narrative from the story and plot, and also a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions and the curatorial processes that contributed to them. storyspace, our web based interface and API to the ontology, is being used by curatorial staff in two museums to model curatorial narratives and the processes through which they are constructed.

Reimagining the role of citizens in smart city projects

The technological focus of many Smart City projects relies on top-down innovations, ignoring the role that citizens can play in improving their local communities. In this paper we outline our approach to supporting citizens in playing an active role in urban innovation, from the crowdsourcing of initial ideas through to facilitating citizen involvement in the realization of community projects. This extends previous work in the field by exploring how to go beyond identifying issues and ideas to securing a commitment from citizens to assisting a project intended to address an identified issue.

Storyscope: using theme and setting to guide story enrichment from external data sources

Museum narratives, like other forms of narrative, are developed from an underlying conceptualization of events that can be referred to as the story. Storyscope is a web-based environment for constructing and exploring museum narratives and their underlying concepts. Storyscope aligns with a formal model of story and narrative specialized for a museum context called the curate ontology. This paper will explore the plot-reasoning component of Storyscope that provides intelligent support for the selection of events within the story and their interconnection as a coherent structure to be told within the narrative. Plot reasoning uses both internal knowledge and external information sources, such as Freebase and Factforge, to propose events that can be used to incrementally develop storylines and to emplot a museum narrative. The approach taken uses the notions of setting and theme to search and rank events in terms of their relevance to the developing storyline. This paces the expansion of the story in each step, ensures that the story develops in a direction that is of interest to the author and helps to maintain narrative cohesion, an important goal of story-building. Plot development is also supported by methods for clustering events into related plot elements and by using information from Freebase to propose different types of influence relations between story events.

Mobile technology to support coherent story telling across freely explored outdoor artworks

Museum professionals create exhibitions that tell stories about museum objects. The exhibits are usually arranged to reveal the relationships between them and to highlight the story being told. But sometimes objects are in fixed places and cannot be re-positioned. This paper presents a solution to the problem of how to tell conceptually coherent stories across a set of fixed artworks within the grounds of a museum and to reveal relationships between them. A study was conducted in which QR codes were used to provide access, through mobile devices, to online information about artworks. A notion of conceptual coherence and coverage of artworks was used to construct online story trails linking artworks to each other based on overlap of key story features such as setting, people and themes. Visitors were free at all times to follow their own path through the museum grounds and choose which objects they wanted to stop and engage with. The QR code trail was evaluated on an outdoor art trail at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Analytics of page access were used to identify how often visitors scanned QR codes and to what extent, once they had visited the online information about an artwork, they were likely to follow the story links.

Towards smart city education

Sustainability has been an important topic in UK schools for some time, most notably since the Sustainable School Strategy was proposed by the UK Department for Education (DFES) in 2006. However, as smart city technologies emerge and show real promise in contributing to a more sustainable future, it is becoming apparent that new skills for working with the big urban data sets that drive these innovations must be taught to upcoming generations to ensure that they can be active smart city citizens. Current practice within schools is to distribute teaching of different aspects of data skills across the curriculum. We ask the question how can data skills be taught using a more unified and practical approach, which facilitates application of skills in genuine, smart city contexts. We propose to use Urban Data Games to set a context for learning, and demonstrating, practical application of skills for handling large complex data sets. This paper focuses on an Appathon challenge, which will shortly be trialled in a Milton Keynes school, in which participants are tasked to design a novel App from real satellite data after first learning and applying data skills to data about home energy consumption.

Learning analytics and machine learning

Learning analytics (LA) as a field remains in its infancy. Many of the techniques now prominent from practitioners have been drawn from various fields, including HCI, statistics, computer science, and learning sciences. In order for LA to grow and advance as a discipline, two significant challenges must be met: 1) development of analytics methods and techniques that are native to the LA discipline, and 2) practitioners in LA to develop algorithms and models that reflect the social and computational dimensions of analytics. This workshop introduces researchers in learning analytics to machine learning (ML) and the opportunities that ML can provide in building next generation analysis models.

Web supported emplotment: using object and event descriptions to facilitate storytelling online and in galleries

The process of emplotment refers to the selection of significant events in a story and the identification of pertinent relations between them, in order to produce a plot providing an interpretation of those events. We are investigating how models of emplotment can be applied to develop web-based tools for creating and interpreting narratives. In particular, we are focusing on the process undertaken by art gallery professionals to design and present exhibitions. This paper presents a set of plot relations developed in collaboration with museum professionals from two national galleries in Ireland, and shows how theories of narrative and digital cultural heritage research have informed the development of an ontology and system to support the authoring of curatorial narratives.