Projects

The field of Learning Analytics and Academic Analytics has developed considerably during the last year in European HEIs. Through the use of Learning Analytics tools, the management of Universities and Academic programs in Europe has been modernized. In Latin American, there is a lack of local capacity to design and build this specialized tools that could be used to improve HEIs administration. The LALA project seeks to modernize the academic decision making process through building local capacity to create Learning Analytics to support decision makers at different levels in Latin American HEIs.

The EMBED project entails a strategic partnership on the introduction of  innovation in higher education by the implementation of blended learning (b-learning) in the partnership and beyond. The partnership consists of front-runner universities in b-learning and aims at creating a reference model for developing and implementing blended learning, embracing all levels of an institution: the design of the blended course, organisational aspects such as staff support and training, and institutional leadership, developing policies and strategies making the institution continuously innovative.

The OnTask Project aims to improve the academic experience of students through the delivery of timely, personalised and actionable student feedback throughout their participation in a course.

In this project, we have three aims. First, to characterize the language constructs of students and teachers across a number of disciplines.  Second, to explore whether understanding disciplinary literacy development can support the provision of effective and formative feedback to learners and the enhance the quality of their skill development. Finally, we address the challenge of automated evaluation of students’ written responses to questions.

Fluokitten is a Clojure library that implements category theory concepts, such as functors, applicative functors, monads, monoids etc. in idiomatic Clojure. Project goals are:

• Fit well into idiomatic Clojure – Clojure programmers should be able to use and understand Fluokitten like any regular Clojure library.
• Fit well into Haskell monadic types conventions – programmers should be able to reuse existing widespread monadic programming know-how and easily translate it to Clojure code.
• Be reasonably easy to learn – the code from the existing books, articles and tutorials for learning monadic programming, which is usually written in Haskell should be easily translatable to Clojure with Fluokitten.
• Offer good performance.

To assist European universities to become more mature users and custodians of digital data about their students as they learn online, the SHEILA project builds a policy development framework that promotes formative assessment and personalized learning, by taking advantage of direct engagement of stakeholders in the development process.

The  project aimed to develop a better understanding of learning analytics and the ways in which analytics can be interpreted, applied and actioned by teachers to improve teaching and learning practices.

The BeyondLMS project extends the field of Learning Analytics (LA) by developing an open source toolkit for performing sophisticated analysis of learners’ engagement in connected learning environments. The toolkit will provide web based forms and contextualised dashboards to enable both students and academics to explore and analyse student behaviour while learning is occurring (rather than after the fact). The Connected Learning Analytics Toolkit is the final result of the project.

GRASS was a 3-year, EU-funded research project (project reference number: 543029-LLP-1-2013-1-RS-KA3-KA3MP), focusing on representing soft skills of learners of various ages and at different levels of education in a quantitative, measurable way, so that these skills can become the subject of formal validation and recognition. The project is being developed under the umbrella of the flagship European funding programme in the field of education and training, the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP). The key objective of LLP is to enable individuals at all stages of their lives to pursue stimulating learning opportunities across Europe.

This project aimed to undertake a review of learning analytics across Australian universities within an international context. The project focused on how learning analytics were informing teaching practice, personalised learning, and applications for improving retention and identification of students at-risk.

This project sought to further research and develop a social annotation technology called the Collaborative Lecture Annotation System (CLAS).

Learners everywhere make extensive use of the Internet. Their success is threatened in two ways. First, providers of information rarely apply learning science to help learners learn. Thus, learners acutely need skills for learning. Second, too many learners have too few learning skills; moreover, they use poor judgment to regulate skills they have. This novel and interdisciplinary project aimed to remedy this dilemma.

JEFF is a free, open source expert system explanation facility written in Java. It enables expert system creators to provide the HOW and STRATEGY explanations regarding the inference process. Since it is a Java framework, it is supposed to be a generic solution for modern rule-based systems. It is simple to use and can generate explanations in the form of natural language like sentences. Internationalization is also supported and explanations can be saved as textual, XML, RTF or PDF reports.

IntelLEO was a 3-year ICT research project (STREP) in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission (2009-2012). It was coordinated by the ATB Institute from Bremen, Germany.

Intelligent Learning Extended Organisation (IntelLEO) is a new paradigm representing a community that emerges from a temporal integration of two or more different business and educational communities and organisational cultures (industrial, research and educational). For example, interested individuals from an industrial enterprise may create such a community with researchers from a university department interested from the research perspective in the same area in which the enterprise does its business. The temporal integration of the two parties may come in order to collaborate on learning activities and achieve their learning goals more efficiently.