June 28, 2017
SLATE sent a team of researchers and students to this year’s conference. They presented a full paper in a session on Learning Analytics (LA) Policies and a research poster in the poster session. In addition, SLATE associated researchers were part of the pre-conference activities.
Grete Netteland presented iComPAss work in the pre-conference workshop on Writing Analytics Literacy – Bridging from Research to Practice and Weiqin Chen organised a pre-conference workshop on Learning Analytics and Policy (LAP) – international aspirations, achievements and constraints. Learn more.
Read more about SLATE’s participation.
SLATE-associated researcher, Weiqin Chen said that her pre-conference workshop underlined that privacy, ethics and policy related to LA are becoming an important new focus area at LAK conferences. She says that in LAK2017 there were dedicated sessions for these topics, for the first time. She reports that the sessions were so popular that there it was standing-room only! Weiqin feels that this highlights that the LA community is beginning to understand the importance of these issues in the development of LA.
The workshop, Learning Analytics and Policy (LAP) – international aspirations, achievements and constraints, explored and documented ways in which policies at national and regional level are shaping the development of learning analytics. There were participants from India, China, Japan, Germany, Romania, Norway, the Netherlands, UK, Australia, and Canada.
They shared experiences and discussed policies related to LA in their respective countries. The discussions made it possible to compare and document the aspirations, achievements and constraints in the different countries. The results from the workshop will be published in a special issue in a well-reputed international journal with contributions from the participants.
SLATE PhD student, Jeanette Samuelsen says that she was invited to attend on her 2nd day at SLATE!! It was her first academic conference!
Samuelsen felt it was a very valuable experience. She explains attending LAK2017 gave her a good idea of the “state-of-the-field” in LA. She gained insights into what other researchers are doing, and what she could be doing to contribute to this field. Attending such a gathering also provides researchers with opportunities for networking – both reinforcing established networks and building new ones. In particular, Samuelsen enjoyed learning more about writing analytics. She can imagine attending one of the Learning Analytics Summer Institutes (LASI).
SLATE researchers Cecilie Hansen, Barbara Wasson, Hans Skretting, Grete Netteland and Marina Hirnstein presented a poster about their work with a project called iComPAss.
Hansen explains that LA measures and analyses learning as it happens. By putting together data from various learning resources, researchers try to understand how learning takes place, and how to optimise this process. She underlines that LA as a new discipline is attracting increasing interest particularly when combined with fields such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Attending important conferences such as LAK is important for researchers to maintain their overview of this young and rapidly developing field. It also introduces them to new directions researchers are taking around the world.
iComPAss involves LA outside a traditional classroom setting – professional development and competence building in Fire Fighters. It investigates how competence modelling, open learner models, learning analytics, and visualisation can support decision-making by learners, instructors, and organisation leaders, and evaluates the impact. Learn more.
Read more in Norwegian from UniResearch.
Check out Society for Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR) YouTube Channel for more info
May 16: Keynote - Timothy McKay: Can a University become a Learning Laboratory?
May 17: Keynote - Sidney D’Mello: Multimodal Classroom Analytics
May 15: Keynote - Sanna Järvelä: Big data from a little person - Using multimodal data for understanding regulation of learning.
March 5-9, 2018 • Sydney, NSW, Australia
The 8th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference will be held at the SMC Conference & Function Centre in Sydney, Australia on March 5–9, 2018. The preparations for LAK18 are currently ongoing and more information will be released in the coming months
