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…

This paper addresses dynamical interdependence among the actions of group members. I assume that the actions of each member can be represented as nodes of a dynamical network and then collect the nodes into disjoint subsets (components) representing the individual group members. Interdependence among group members' actions can then be defined with…

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…

The widespread adoption of digital e-learning environments and other learning technology has provided researchers with ready access to large quantities of data. Much of this data comes from discussion forums and has been studied with analytical methods drawn from social network analysis. However, within this large body of research there exists…

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…

The statistics used in education research are based on central trends such as the mean or standard deviation, discarding outliers. This paper adopts another viewpoint that has emerged in statistics, called extreme value theory (EVT). EVT claims that the bulk of normal distribution is comprised mainly of uninteresting variations while the most…

Identifying which online behaviours and interactions are associated with student perceptions of being supported will enable a deeper understanding of how those activities contribute to learning experiences. Student language is one aspect of their interaction in need of greater exploration within discourse-based online learning environments. As a…

An emerging trend toward computer-mediated collaborative learning environments promotes lively exchanges between learners in order to facilitate learning. Discourse can play an important role in enhancing epistemology, pedagogy, and assessments in these environments. In this paper, we highlight some of our recent work showing the advantages using…

This paper introduces the scientometric method of main path analysis and its application in an exemplary study of the paths of knowledge development and the roles of contributors in Wikiversity. Data from two scientific domains in this online learning community has been used. We see this as a step forward in adapting and adopting network analysis…

In a previous study, we found that real-time mutual gaze perception (i.e., being able to see the gaze of your partner in real time on a computer screen while solving a learning task) had a positive effect on student collaboration and learning (Schneider & Pea, 2013). The goals of this paper are (1) to explore a variety of computational…

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…