Note: Room changed to Buchanan Tower 104A
Changing Students Learning Behaviour via Learning Analytics
Abstract: Three main audiences for learning analytics are institutions, instructors & course designers, and students. Our focus is on students. We take a stance that a goal of learning analytics for students should be not only to inform them about their performance, but rather clearly influence learners to modify their learning behaviour and lead to better learning outcomes. As learning sciences show, students’ learning is heavily influenced by their individual differences. Our research aims at developing understanding of how information presented in and a form of Learning Analytics visualizations affects individual students. In this talk I will elaborate on these theoretical concepts and present results of our study showing varying effect of Learning Analytics visualizations on students with different goals. Our findings highlight the methodological importance of considering individual differences and pose important implications for future design and research of learning analytics visualizations.
Dr. Marek Hatala is a Professor at the School Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and a Director of the Laboratory for Ontological Research. He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Technical University in Kosice (Slovakia). His research is driven by the problems arising between the computing systems and their users. The areas of his prior interests include configuration engineering design, organizational learning, semantic interoperability, ontologies and semantic web, user modeling in ubiquitous and ambient intelligence environments, and software engineering and service oriented architectures. Dr. Hatala’s current research is framed within the area of Learning Analytics. Specifically, he builds on the learning sciences to establishing the theories of effects of open learner models on learner’s motivation with the goal to improve their learning outcomes in the online learning environments.