The learning analytics stream focuses on understanding and improving how humans learn within digital environments, taking into account the social nature of learning. The rich set of traces left by interaction in such platforms provides opportunities to develop analytical models that provide valuable insights into student learning, as well as ways in which we can intervene to improve learning outcomes.
Project List
Learning analytics framework for delivering effective training experience for medical professionals
Experiential learning proposes a highly engaging environment in which learners, instructors and mentors interact around team-based projects. The high levels of engagement present in these environments need an equally high level of interaction with teaching and mentoring staff. The key to transform this scenario into an effective learning experience is to provide personalised feedback to learners throughout their journey. Practera offers a virtual environment to enact this type of experiences. Learners undertake their real-world, collaborative projects, upload their deliverables, inputs and reflections and a team of mentors and reviewers offer personalised feedback for the next stages. This feedback cycle requires a comprehensive knowledge of the student and is challenging to deploy for large student cohorts. Practera and the Centre for Change and Complexity (C3L) at the University of South Australia are working together to explore how learning analytics methods can support this teaching environment, identify patterns of engagement, connect the knowledge with the right type of personalised support, and evaluate its impact.
Contact person: Dr Srećko Joksimović [website] [email]
Learning analytics approaches for assessing the attainment of graduate qualities
Rapid changes in the modern economy caused by globalisation, job automation and advanced technologies, have placed increased emphasis on developing transferable qualities, skills and attributes, collectively known as graduate qualities. The transition from a curriculum that emphasises knowledge to the development of 21st-century literacies aims to enable students to be better prepared for, and capable of, navigating the changing and increasingly complex workplaces. Schools and universities are challenged by the need to develop, measure and report on student progress and attainment of graduate qualities and competencies.
In collaboration with Trinity College, an independent school in Gawler, SA, this project focuses on combining survey and learning trace data to assess students development of graduate qualities, in particular students' self-regulated learning (SRL) and meta-cognition. The project leverages already existing student survey data and other data sources to establish a foundation of analytical benchmarks that can be used to inform the development and attainment of graduate qualities at Trinity College. Graduate qualities have been identified as one of the critical areas that can drive the continuous improvement of the College’s teaching and learning practice. The primary goal of this project is to examine the validity of the existing surveys and their use for assessing students’ SRL and metacognitive skills.
Contact person: Dr Vitomir Kovanović [website] [email]
Promoting and Developing Self Regulated Learning Mindsets and Skills in First-Year Students
Funded under Fulbright Specialist Program (Professor Roger Azevedo, Univeristy of Central Florida, USA)
Self-regulated learning (SRL) has a positive and long-lasting impact on academic development, employability and career progression of students. Despite the demonstrated importance of SRL education has long struggled to develop and assess practices that can promote student self-regulation skills. This project is designed to raise awareness of the importance of student SRL and promote the development of these skills. The project builds on our prior work to also establish empirical measures of SRL progression that are student centric and scalable.
Contact person: Professor Shane Dawson [website] [email]
The impact of personalised learning interventions on student engagement in an electronic learning environment
Continuing professional development is one of the most important components of medical education. From the learning perspective there are several conditions that make it unique: professionals need to acquire certain skills both in their domain of knowledge, but also soft skills, the acquisition is strongly influenced by the environment, and requires flexible yet effective structures to guarantee its success. ModMed is a company that offers engaging, dynamic learning experiences for health professionals. Audits and feedback are crucial in CPD, and scaling the delivery of these elements is challenging. ModMed and the Centre for Change and Complexity (C3L) at the University of South Australia are working together to use machine learning algorithms combined with detailed mapping of the curriculum and competencies to support doctors through their CPD with personalised and frequent suggestions to comply with the requirements of the medical regulatory bodies.
Contact person: Dr Srećko Joksimović [website] [email]
Preserving Student Privacy while Enabling Learning Analytics & AI research
Project website: https://trustedanalytics.com.au
UniSA/C3L contact:
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Dr Srecko Joksimovic, srecko.joksimovic@unisa.edu.au,
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Dr Chen Zhan, chen.zhan@unisa.edu.au
C3L is leading UniSA engagement in one of the sixteen projects awarded a total of $30 million by the Commonwealth’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Round 7 grants program. The CRC-P, focused on privacy and learning analytics, is led by Practera, a Sydney-based EdTech start-up and long-term collaborator with C3L researchers. Additional collaborators in the project include CSIRO’s Data61, global education company Navitas, Education Technology and innovation industry hub EduGrowth, and cyber security solution provider Cybermerc.
The project will develop a platform that allows educational providers to share data and algorithms while still preserving the privacy of student data records (Figure 1). This will enable education institutions and companies to better support the learning needs of students through the use of learning analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms. This will provide teachers and students with insights into what is working during learning processes and how to improve self-regulation, goal setting, and learning strategy selection. The solution will be developed and tested within Practera’s experiential learning platform which supports work-integrated learning programs, internships and skills credentialing.
Previous engagement between C3L and Practera was centred around the development of personalized, analytics-driven interventions that supported students at risk of not completing the program and evaluating the impact of these interventions. A particular focus was on understanding collaboration and cooperation in team-based projects and deploying interventions to improve students’ teamwork skills. This CRC-P engagement continues this work, with the additional element of adapting previously developed algorithms to work on privacy-enhanced datasets produced by Data61. This will involve direct collaboration between Data61 and C3L to iteratively adapt their algorithms. Key activities for C3L will be:
- Development of personalised, analytics-driven interventions to support individual and collaborative learning and work
- Validate baseline interventions
- Collaborate with Data61 to adapt algorithms for privacy-preserved data
- Validate novel algorithms against the baseline
Figure 1. Key Project deliverables
