Deadline Extended for Early Career Research Grant – due May 17, 2024

The SoLAR Executive Committee and ECR Grant Working Group is pleased to announce the deadline extension for the Early Career Research Grant. Applications are now due May 17, 2024 by 5pm EDT.

Purpose

The SoLAR ECR Research Grant serves to support promising early career researchers who demonstrate the potential to advance research and practice in learning analytics and increase the educational and socio-economic impacts of learning analytics. Proposed projects should improve our understanding of learning analytics and learning in general, result in positive impacts on education, and align with the topics identified for the current round. It is expected that the ECR grant will help successful applicants develop their career by enabling an initiative that is scalable or has potential to attract further funding.

Applicant eligibility

Applications from individuals based in academic or not-for-profit organizations are welcome, provided the individuals hold valid SoLAR membership when applying and for the term of the project. Applicants need to have been awarded with a PhD qualification no longer than 5 years prior to the application deadline. Each applicant may only submit one application, and each application can only have one named applicant. Past awardees or current SoLAR executive committee members are not eligible to apply.

2024 Themes - The role of learning analytics in the age of Artificial Intelligence

As interest in AI, and especially generative AI, in education continues to rise rapidly, ethical considerations and challenges of inclusion remain important issues for the field (Bond et al., 2024). The field of learning analytics can contribute to these issues by providing a synergised framework that grounds AI innovation and methodology in learners and learning (Yan et al., 2024). This positioning opens up promising avenues of research to bring the two fields together. We welcome proposals of research that showcase the practicalities, possibilities and challenges in integrating these two fields to foster ethical use of genAI in education as well as to mitigate the digital divide. Example topics include, but are not limited to:

• Understand the impact of AI technologies on student learning and teaching;
• Identify innovative AI driven methodologies and tools to gain insights into learning;
• Understand how AI technologies impact different strands of learning analytics research, e.g., personalised feedback, writing analytics research, self-regulated learning, etc.;
• Explore how learning analytics can be used to foster insights into new AI literacies, such as prompt engineering;
• Explore the role of learning analytics in futures literacy;
• Examine how generative AI impacts learning and assessment, and how learning analytics can help;
• Make sense of the intersections of humans and AI in practices of learning analytics;
• Enhance the use of learning analytics with explainable AI;
• Evaluate the impact of learning analytics on institutional strategy development and monitoring;
• Explore how institutions navigate ethical considerations of AI when adopting learning analytics;
• Explore how to ensure trustworthiness of learning analytics and AI in education in parallel with data protection and informed consent of data owners;
• Understand ways that algorithmic fairness & biases in AI technologies may affect learners.
• Explore ways learning analytics may incorporate AI to tackle major challenges in education, such as educational equity and quality.

Level of award

A total of $15,000 CAD is available to fund one to two projects. Funds will be managed directly by SoLAR via approved expense invoices.

Awardee(s) will also receive publicity via SoLAR’s channels to help them connect with the community, complimentary registration for a regional Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI) or LAP event, and the International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK).

For more information on eligible costs, criteria and selection process and the application guidelines, please review the ECR Grant webpage.