An essential part of making dashboards more effective in motivating students and leading to desirable behavioural change is knowing what information to communicate to the student and how to frame and present it. Most of the research studying dashboards' impact on learning analyzes learning indicators of students as a group. Understanding how a…

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) has become an essential component of today's knowledge-based, innovation-centred economy and society. As such, communication and CPS are now considered critical 21st century skills and incorporated into educational practice, policy, and research. Despite general agreement that these are important skills, there…

The analysis of student questions can be used to improve the learning experience for both students and teachers. We investigated questions (N = 6457) asked before the class by first-year medicine/pharmacy students on an online platform, used by professors to prepare for Q&A sessions. Our long-term objectives are to help professors in…

By participating in asynchronous course discussion forums, students can work together to refine their ideas and construct knowledge collaboratively. Typically, some messages simply repeat or paraphrase course content, while others bring in new material, demonstrate reasoning, integrate concepts, and develop solutions. Through the messages they…

Although collaboration is considered a key 21st-century skill, oftentimes it is only assessed through the outcome measures of individual learners. In this paper, we draw upon collaborative cognitive load theory (CCLT) to explain the process of collaboration in learning from the point of view of the collective, rather than an individual learner.…

The field of learning analytics (LA) has seen a gradual shift from purely data-driven approaches to more holistic views of improving student learning outcomes through data-informed learning design (LD). Despite the growing potential of LA in higher education (HE), the benefits are not yet convincing to the practitioner, in particular aspects of…

We introduce a novel approach to visualizing temporal clickstream behaviour in the context of a degree-satisfying online course, "Habitable Worlds," offered through Arizona State University. The current practice for visualizing behaviour within a digital learning environment is to generate plots based on hand-engineered or coded features…

This commentary reflects on the contributions to learning analytics and theory by a paper that describes how multiple theoretical frameworks were woven together to inform the creation of a new, automated discourse analysis tool. The commentary highlights the contributions of the original paper, provides some alternative approaches, and touches on…

This paper describes an application of learning analytics that builds on an existing research program investigating how students contribute and attend to the messages of others in asynchronous online discussions. We first overview the E-Listening research program and then explain how this work was translated into analytics that students and…

Online forums (synchronous and asynchronous) offer exciting data opportunities to analyze how people influence one another through their interactions. However, researchers must address several analytic difficulties involving the data (missing values, nested structure [messages within topics], non-sequential messages), outcome variables (discrete…