How was the activity? A visualization support for a case of location‐based learning design

Abstract

Over the last few years, the use of mobile technologies has brought the formulation of location‐based learning approaches shaping new or enhanced educational activities. Involving teachers in the design of these activities is important because the designs need to be aligned with the requirements of the specific educational settings. Yet analysing the implementation of the activities with students is also critical, not only for assessment purposes but also for enabling the identification of learning design elements that should be revised and improved. This paper studies a case that applies visualizations to support students' self‐assessment and teachers' inquiry of a mobile learning design. The design is a gamified location‐based learning activity composed by geolocated questions and implemented with the “QuesTInSitu: The Game” mobile application. The activity was designed by seven teachers and enacted by 81 secondary education students organized in a total of 23 groups. Log files, gathered from “QuesTInSitu: The Game,” provided the data for the visualizations, which represented relevant aspects of the group activity enactment (both time used to answer questions and to reach the geographical zone of the questions, scores obtained per zone, etc). On the one hand, the visualizations were discussed with the teachers as a learning analytics tool potentially useful to consider when redesigning the activity, if needed. On the other hand, the study shows that the visualizations led students to make a better diagnosis of their own activity performance.

Editorial: Learning design, teacher inquiry into student learning and learning analytics: A call for action

“…Location‐based games are another example of a pedagogical scenario that is hard to monitor. Melero, Hernández‐Leo, Sun, Santos and Blat () present a learning design dashboard developed to support teachers in such a setting and illustrate how it transformed teachers' inquiry strategies, enabling them to make evidence‐based learning design decisions. As with the paper by Haya et al , this study shows how the combination of learning design, TISL and learning analytics can open the door to effective new pedagogies.…”

Analytics for learning design: A layered framework and tools

“…Presence and usage behavior within activities that learners and other participants do when completing a learning design (Bos & Brand-Gruwel, 2016;Lockyer et al, 2013;Rienties & Toetenel, 2016;Shum & Ferguson, 2012). It depends on the activity types (eg, attempts and use of hints in gaming, notes in annotation activities, interactions in collaborative activities) (Bakharia et al, 2016;IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2013;Sergis & Sampson, 2017); time and location when/ where process actions occur (Melero, Hern andez-Leo, Sun, Santos, & Blat, 2015). Performance Assessment-related data (eg, grades from assignments, quizzes, exams, number of mistakes) (Dyckhoff et al, 2013;Ferguson, 2012;Ga sević, Dawson & Siemens, 2015;Rienties & Toetenel, 2016;Sergis & Sampson, 2017).…”

Developing Learning Analytics Design Knowledge in the “Middle Space”: The Student Tuning Model and Align Design Framework for Learning Analytics Use

“…Empirically, there has been some recent research into the potential for analytics to be used by teachers as part of their reflective practice (Ghislandi & Raffaghelli, 2015;Avramides, Hunter, Oliver, & Luckin, 2014;Melero, Hernández-Leo, Sun, Santos, & Blat, 2015;McKenney & Mor, 2015), as well as the development of specifically designed analytics tools that are embedded to assist teacher inquiry into student learning (Haya, Daems, Malzahn, Castellanos, & Hoppe, 2015). For example, the information provided though analytics can be used as data to support teachers in making decisions about when to intervene and support their students (van Leeuwen, 2015).…”