The use of videos in teaching has gained impetus in recent years, especially after the increased attention towards remote learning. Understanding students' video-related behaviour through learning (and video) analytics can offer instructors significant potential to intervene and enhance course designs. Previous studies explored students' video…

Implementing collaborative action research (CAR) is recognized as an effective strategy for transforming professional practice through evidence-based methods. How can CAR be carried out online, and how is data collected through digital methods? This case study will address these aspects in the context of a CAR, international professional…

Educational research is one of the many fields of knowledge that frequently use case studies as a research method, particularly when applying an interpretive approach. Based on literature reviews and a systematic analysis of current scientific literature, this paper examines the prevalence and characteristics of the case study as a methodology for…

Crowdsourcing is an important tool for collecting spatio-temporal data, which has various applications in education. The objectives of this study were to develop and test a laboratory exercise on soil erosion by water and field data crowdsourcing in an online introductory soil science course (FNR 2040: Soil Information Systems) at Clemson…

Educational data mining has gained a lot of attention among scientists in recent years and constitutes an efficient tool for unraveling the concealed knowledge in educational data. Recently, semisupervised learning methods have been gradually implemented in the educational process demonstrating their usability and effectiveness. Cotraining is a…

Privacy and surveillance are pervasive words not only in higher education but also in many areas in our life. We use and hear them often while shopping online, reading the news, or checking the policies and terms of websites. In this study, I highlight the challenges of data collection and surveillance in education, specifically, in online…

In this paper, we address issues of transparency, modularity, and privacy with the introduction of an open source, web-based data repository and analysis tool tailored to the Massive Open Online Course community. The tool integrates data request/authorization and distribution workflow features as well as provides a simple analytics module upload…

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…

Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics--both data and algorithms--are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about…

In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a single student who failed an online module which formed part of a master's programme in Professional Education and Leadership. We use this case study to examine assessment practices in higher education in the online environment. In taking this approach, we go against the current predilection…

cMOOCs, which are based on connectivist learning theory, bring challenges for learners as well as opportunities for self-inquiry. Previous studies have shown that learners in cMOOCs may have difficulties learning, but these studies do not provide any in-depth, empirical explorations of student difficulties or support strategies. This paper…

This article starts with an overview on China's MOOC phenomenon and social media, and then reports a comparative, multiple case study on three selected MOOC communities that have emerged on social media in China. These representative MOOC communities included: (a) MOOC Academy, the largest MOOC community in China, (b) Zhejiang University of…

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the effect of the affordances of a virtual learning environment and a personal learning environment (PLE) in the configuration of the students' personal networks in a higher education context. The results are discussed in light of the adaptation of the students to the learning network made up by two…

Effectively grouping learners in an online environment is a highly useful task. However, datasets used in this task often have large numbers of attributes of disparate types and different scales, which traditional clustering approaches cannot handle effectively. Here, a unique dissimilarity measure based on the random forest, which handles the…

The article addresses the question of how the assessment process with large-scale data derived from online learning environments will be different from the assessment process without it. Following an explanation of big data and how it is different from previously available learner data, we describe three notable features that characterize…