Companion Proceedings of the 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK’21)

We are very pleased to welcome you to the Eleventh International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK21), organized by the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). This year’s conference, while originally planned to be hosted by University of California, Irvine at the Newport Beach Marriott, is held virtually April 12-16, 2021 in an effort to protect the LAK community from COVID-19.

The theme for the 11th annual LAK conference is “The impact we make: The contributions of learning analytics to learning”. As academic fields concerned with human behavior develop and mature, their impact on advancing scientific understanding and practical application becomes an important marker of success. As an integrated, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field, learning analytics is presented with questions regarding its contributions in two areas: (i) the respective fields from which it draws, and (ii) its own development as a research domain. The LAK21 conference is intended for both researchers and practitioners, and we have invited them to come and join a proactive dialogue around the impact of learning analytics and its practical adoption. We have further extended our invite to educators, leaders, administrators, and government and industry professionals interested in the field of learning analytics and related disciplines.

We received large numbers of high-quality submissions. The research track received 228 submissions (129 full paper submissions and 99 short paper submissions), which represents a slight decrease of about 13% in total number of submissions compared to last year which was to be expected due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It does, however, represent a 7% increase compared to 2019. As usual, the research papers are published as Proceedings by the ACM.
In addition to the full and short papers of the research track, we have accepted 10 practitioner reports, 36 posters, 4 demos, 8 doctoral consortium submissions, and 18 workshop proposals. Some of these workshops had their own call for papers and their accepted submissions are included in these Companion Proceedings as well. We are most grateful for all the hard work by the practitioner, workshop, poster & demo and doctoral consortium chairs as well as by the program committee and their insightful and constructive comments and reviews. These Companion Proceedings could not have been done without their generous help and support.

We would like to stress our gratitude for the hard effort during COVID times by researchers and all involved in our community. We recognize that as we moved through the past year of the coronavirus pandemic all students, researchers and staff in this community faced new physical and emotional challenges, particularly with feelings of stress, uncertainty and fear. As such, we would like to thank you all for the effort you devoted that has allowed this conference to happen this year.

Our hope is that the LAK21 participants and the readers of these proceedings will recognize the contributions of the field of learning analytics within the scope of the interdisciplinary fields from which we draw. This could include more traditional contributions such as theoretical, methodological as well as practical and community-based contributions such as increased representation from other disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, AI). As an interdisciplinary community ourselves, monitoring these external contributions is particularly meaningful as broadly advancing scientific understanding and practical application becomes an important marker of success within our field.