CITE & Faculty of Education Joint Seminar
Directions for dealing with ugly truths about learning analytics
Learning analytics is a field that aims to unlock the potential of digital data with the aim to enhance learning and learning environments. The field has attracted much attention and demonstrated some important benefits for education (e.g., improved retention rates and personalised feedback at scale). Despite these promising results, there are still some ugly truths that the field has already learned such as relatively small and sparse data sets, limited generalizability and causality of predictive models, and limited analysis of stakeholder needs. Their consideration is essential for learning analytics to make a profound impact on learning, teaching, and education. This talk will explore these ugly truths and promising directions that can be taken to address them.
Dragan Gašević is Distinguished Professor of Learning Analytics in the Department of Human Centred Computing of the Faculty of Information Technology and the Director of the Centre for Learning Analytics at Monash University. Dragan’s research interests center around data analytic and design methods that advance understanding of self-regulated and collaborative learning. He is a founder and served as the President (2015-2017) of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. He has also held several honorary appointments in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He is a recipient of the Life-time Member Award (2022) as the highest distinction of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and a Distinguished Member (2022) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2019-2022, he was recognized as the national field leader in educational technology in The Australian’s Research Magazine that is published annually. He led the EU-funded SHEILA project that received the Best Research Project of the Year Award (2019) from the Association for Learning Technology.