These pages aim to explain and interpret why the late Mika Seppälä, a conformal geometer, proposed to model student study behaviour using concepts from conformal geometry, such as Riemann surfaces and Strebel differentials. Over many years Mika Seppälä taught online calculus courses to students at Florida State University in the United States, as…

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…

Model evaluation -- the process of making inferences about the performance of predictive models -- is a critical component of predictive modelling research in learning analytics. We survey the state of the practice with respect to model evaluation in learning analytics, which overwhelmingly uses only naïve methods for model evaluation or…

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…

Extensive research in learning science has established the importance of time management in online learning. Recently, learning analytics (LA) has shed further lights on the temporal characteristics of learning by allowing researchers to capture authentic digital footprints of student learning behaviours. Nonetheless, students' timing of…

Learning analytics has reserved its position as an important field in the educational sector. However, the large-scale collection, processing, and analyzing of data has steered the wheel beyond the borders to face an abundance of ethical breaches and constraints. Revealing learners' personal information and attitudes, as well as their activities,…

In this paper, we present progress towards a longitudinal study of the post-course career advancement of MOOC learners. We present initial results and analysis plans for how to link this to in-course behaviour, towards better understanding the goals of all MOOC learners.

Lecture videos are amongst the most widely used instructional methods within present Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other digital educational platforms. As the main form of instruction, student engagement behaviour, including interaction with videos, directly impacts the student success or failure and accordingly, in-video dropouts…

Dealing with the vast quantities of text that students generate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other large-scale online learning environments is a daunting challenge. Computational tools are needed to help instructional teams uncover themes and patterns as students write in forums, assignments, and surveys. This paper introduces to the…

The article, "Distributed Revisiting: An Analytic for Retention of Coherent Science Learning" is an interesting study that operates at the intersection of learning theory and learning analytics. The authors observe that the relationship between learning theory and research in the learning analytics field is constrained by several…

This article introduces the special issue from the 2015 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. We describe the current state of the field and identify some of the trends in recent research. As the field continues to expand, there seem to be at least three directions of vigorous growth: (1) the inclusion of multimodal data (gesture,…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are being used across the world to provide millions of learners with access to education. Many who begin these courses complete them successfully, or to their own satisfaction, but the high numbers who do not finish remain a subject of concern. In 2013, a team from Stanford University analyzed engagement…

This paper describes investigations in visualizing logpaths of students in an online calculus course held at Florida State University in 2014. The clickstreams making up the logpaths can be used to visualize student progress in the information space of a course as a graph. We consider the graded activities as nodes of the graph, while information…

In just a short period, social media have altered many aspects of our daily lives, from how we form and maintain social relationships to how we discover, access, and share information online. Now social media are also affecting how we teach and learn. In this paper, we discuss methods that can help researchers and educators evaluate and understand…

The goal of this article is to preserve and distribute the information presented at the LASI (2014) workshop on Coh-Metrix, a theoretically grounded, computational linguistics facility that analyzes texts on multiple levels of language and discourse. The workshop focused on the utility of Coh-Metrix in discourse theory and educational practice. We…