Science Created by You (SCY) is a project on learning in science and technology domains. SCY uses a pedagogical approach that centres around products, called 'emerging learning objects- (ELOs) that are created by students. Students work individually and collaboratively in SCY-Lab (the general SCY learning environment) on 'missions' that are guided by socio-scientific questions (for example 'How can we design a CO2-friendly house?'). Fulfilling SCY missions requires a combination of knowledge from different content areas (eg, physics, mathematics, biology, as well as social sciences). While on a SCY mission, students perform several types of learning activities that can be characterised as productive processes (experiment, game, share, explain, design, etc), they encounter multiple resources, collaborate with varying coalitions of peers and use changing constellations of tools and scaffolds. The configuration of SCY-Lab is adaptive to the actual learning situation and ma y provide advice to students on appropriate learning activities, resources, tools and scaffolds, or peer students who can support the learning process. The SCY project aims at students between 12 and 18 years old. In the course of the project, a total of four SCY missions will be developed, of which one is currently available

This paper describes a series of efforts in building and conceptualizing software agents for distributed collaborative learning. The agents are referred to as pedagogical agents. We have integrated pedagogical agents within two collaborative environments, TeamWave Workplace and Future Learning Environment. The role of agents in these environments differs from past work on software agents in their function as extended awareness mechanisms, focusing on task and concept awareness (conceptual awareness). Our approach is stimulated by Mead's theory of the 'Generalized Other'. The agents collect statistical information on user activity and analyze the information based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building (participation, group interaction, and scientific discourse). Furthermore, the agents define a trajectory in a pedagogical agent design space, which we define in terms of four dimensions: presentation, intervention, task, and pedagogy. We end the paper by comparing our approach with related work.

No abstract

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers’ everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts from the socio-cultural perspective and human-computer interaction (HCI), we design, test, and evaluate a teacher-facing LA dashboard, the Canvas Discussion Analytics Dashboard (CADA), in real educational settings. The goal of this dashboard is to support teachers’ roles in online environments through insights into students’ participation and discourse patterns. We evaluate CADA through 10 in-depth interviews with university teachers to examine their experiences using CADA in seven blended undergraduate and graduate courses over a one-year period. The findings suggest that engaging teachers throughout the analytics tool design process and giving them control/agency over LA tools can favour their adoption in practice. Additionally, the alignment of dashboard metrics with relevant theoretical constructs allows teachers to monitor the learning designs and make course design changes on the fly. The teachers in this study emphasise the need for LA dashboards to provide actionable insights by moving beyond what things are towards how things should be. This study has several contributions. First, we make an artefact contribution (e.g. CADA), an LA dashboard to support teachers with insights into students’ online discussions. Second, by leveraging theory, and working with the teachers to develop and implement a dashboard in authentic teaching environments, we make an empirical, theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of learning analytics and technology enhanced learning. We synthesise these through practical design and implementation considerations for researchers, dashboard developers, and higher education institutions.

No abstract