Sven Charleer

Evaluating the Use of Open Badges in an Open Learning Environment

This paper reports on our ongoing research around learning analytics. We focus on how learning analytics can be used to increase student motivation and the use of badges as a way to aggregate learning activity being a representation of their goals and progress along the course. The context of this work is an open learning environment, based on wikis, blogs, twitter, an activity stream mash-up and an open badges system. Our evaluation analyses perceived usefulness and usability of the system, as well as the impact on student motivation. Our results indicate that badges are useful to motivate students while activity streams have the potential to activate students.

Improving Teacher Awareness Through Activity, Badge and Content Visualizations

This paper introduces LARAe (Learning Analytics Reflection & Awareness environment), a teacher-oriented dashboard that visualizes learning traces from students, badges and course content. We also present an evaluation of the dashboard in a course on Human-Computer Interaction. The LARAe teacher dashboard provides a detailed overview of group and individual activities, achievements and course outcomes. To help visualize the abundance of traces, badges are used to abstract essential aspects of the course such as course goals and social activity. This paper reports our work on LARAe, presents the course in which we evaluated our approach with students and teachers, and analyses our first results that indicate that such an environment can help with teacher awareness.

Learning Analytics Dashboards to Support Adviser-Student Dialogue

This paper presents LISSA (“Learning dashboard for Insights and Support during Study Advice”), a learning analytics dashboard designed, developed, and evaluated in collaboration with study advisers. The overall objective is to facilitate communication between study advisers and students by visualizing grade data that is commonly available in any institution. More specifically, the dashboard attempts to support the dialogue between adviser and student through an overview of study progress, peer comparison, and by triggering insights based on facts as a starting point for discussion and argumentation. We report on the iterative design process and evaluation results of a deployment in 97 advising sessions. We have found that the dashboard supports the current adviser-student dialogue, helps them motivate students, triggers conversation, and provides tools to add personalization, depth, and nuance to the advising session. It provides insights at a factual, interpretative, and reflective level and allows both adviser and student to take an active role during the session.

2 nd cross-LAK: learning analytics across physical and digital spaces

It is of high relevance to the LAK community to explore blended learning scenarios where students can interact at diverse digital and physical learning spaces. This workshop aims to gather the sub-community of LAK researchers, learning scientists and researchers from other communities, interested in ubiquitous, mobile and/or face-to-face learning analytics. An overarching concern is how to integrate and coordinate learning analytics to provide continued support to learning across digital and physical spaces. The goals of the workshop are to share approaches and identify a set of guidelines to design and connect Learning Analytics solutions according to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints to provide support across digital and physical learning spaces.

Creating Effective Learning Analytics Dashboards: Lessons Learnt

Learning Analytics (LA) dashboards help raise student and teacher awareness regarding learner activities. In blog-supported and inquiry-based learning courses, LA data is not limited to student activities, but also contains an abundance of digital learner artefacts, such as blog posts, hypotheses, and mind-maps. Exploring peer activities and artefacts can help students gain new insights and perspectives on learning efforts and outcomes, but requires effort. To help facilitate and promote this exploration, we present the lessons learnt during and guidelines derived from the design, deployment and evaluation of five dashboards.

A qualitative evaluation of a learning dashboard to support advisor-student dialogues

This paper presents an evaluation of a learning dashboard that supports the dialogue between a student and a study advisor. The dashboard was designed, developed, and evaluated in collaboration with study advisers. To ensure scalability to other contexts, the dashboard uses data that is commonly available at any higher education institute. It visualizes the grades of the student, an overview of the progress through the year, his/her position in comparison with peers, sliders to plan the next years and a prediction of the length of the bachelor program for this student in years based on historic data. The dashboard was deployed at KU Leuven, Belgium and used in September 2017 to support 224 sessions between students and study advisers. We observed twenty of these conversations. We also collected feedback from 101 students with questionnaires. Results of our observations indicate that the dashboard primarily triggers insights at the beginning of a conversation. The number of insights and the level of these insights (factual, interpretative and reflective) depends on the context of the conversation. Most insights were triggered in conversations with students doubting to continue the program, indicating that our dashboard is useful to support difficult decision-making processes.

Learning HCI and InfoVis in the Open

In this paper, we report on our experiences with novel learning strategies for HCI and Information Visualisation, in the context of a computer science master curriculum. What sets our experiences somewhat apart is the focus on openness. This includes the use of Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as open communication between the students, the professor and the general public, through web2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, Facebook and Twitter.

Real-Time Dashboards to Support eSports Spectating

eSports matches offer fast-paced entertainment for millions of viewers worldwide, but little is known about how to support a positive viewer experience. One of the key challenges related to popular real-time eSports games (e.g., multiplayer online battle arena games or first-person shooters) is empowering viewers to effectively follow rapid gameplay. In our paper, we address this challenge through the design of information dashboards to improve spectator insight and experience in League of Legends, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Based on surveys that received a total of 788 responses, we design information dashboards that we evaluate with 18 experienced eSports viewers. Our results show that dashboards contribute to spectator insight and experience, but that careful consideration is necessary to adequately manage in-game complexity and cognitive load of viewers, and establish spectator trust in information dashboards through transparent design. Based on these findings, our paper formulates design goals for spectator dashboards, and outlines key opportunities for future work.

Towards an Open Standard for Gameplay Metrics

Gameplay Metrics can help provide insights into player behaviour and performance, supporting game designers and players wishing to better understand their own game, yet such data is often not easily available to the wider public. We take our inspiration from the field of Learning Analytics, which attempts to create awareness and insights for learners by leveraging the gathered activity data and feeding this back to the students in an open way. This paper suggests an open standard for gathering and storing Gameplay Metrics data based on proven standards in Learning Analytics, facilitating easier development of analytical tools across different video games and genres to the benefit of researchers, developers, and players.

How to Use Gamified Dashboards and Learning Analytics for Providing Immediate Student Feedback and Performance Tracking in Higher Education

With the wide use of the Internet and digital data sources, there has been a recent emergence of easy access to student data within learning management systems (LMS), grade data through student information systems (SIS) and broader sector data through benchmarking metrics and standards. Learning analytics on top of this data has introduced greater capabilities for improving student performance through immediate feedback. Current literature considers the role of dashboards for student performance and feedback, but few papers consider the efficacy of fast feedback to students or other ways that information can be fed back to learners. In this paper, we consider the work done by three leading groups addressing the impact of gamification in university education, with a specific focus on how data is presented to the learner, that is using elements such as points, levelling up, narrative and progression to scaffold learning. Results indicate increases in student motivation, engagement, satisfaction, retention and performance enhancements.