LASI21 Speakers
Invited Keynote: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 12:00pm PDT
Title: "I feel on top of my students": How can teachers monitor and support students from a distance?
Description: The sudden shift to online teaching and learning has come with several challenges for educational institutions and teachers in particular. Advancements in the development and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education hold great potential to support learning and teaching from a distance and enable students to progress while working at their own pace. In particular, predictive learning analytics are analytics that are smart enough to predict future student outcomes and performance. While yet not widely applied in formal education, they can be a great tool in the hand of online teachers and help students, including the disadvantaged ones, to succeed. In this talk, I will share my experience of working for more than 4 years with teachers, software designers, and educational managers to design, evaluate and adopt a predictive analytics system at the Open University UK. I will share insights about the large-scale and long-term implementation of the system and lessons learnt that can inform the development and adoption of predictive systems across all levels of education.
Bio: Dr Christothea Herodotou is an Associate Professor at the Open University, UK. She has extensive expertise in the evidence-based design and evaluation of technologies for learning (online platforms, mobile applications, digital games) using mixed-methods research approaches (learning analytics, RCTs, interviews, surveys). She coordinated the evaluation of the Early Alert Indicators project, a university-wide initiative that assessed predictive learning analytics interventions and their impact on students' performance and attainment. The project has received multiple awards for research impact and excellence in teaching. She also holds funding from NSF, ESRC, and Welcome, to improve the design of online citizen science platforms and make science learning more accessible and productive to young people. She is a Fellow of British Academy as she received a mid-career fellowship to produce evidence-based guidelines for the design of mobile applications for young children. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and an Honorary Associate of UCL. She received her Ph.D. degree in Digital Games and Psychology from the University College London (UCL).
Dr. Christothea Herodotou
Invited Panel: Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 2:00pm PDT
Title: Building Regional LA Networks: Stories from Local Event Organizers
Description: SoLAR has encouraged the organization of local/regional events centered around Learning Analytics, in order to provide communities with the opportunity to build capacities and exchange findings derived from this field. So far, Special Interest Groups and Learning Analytics Networks have systematically organized these type of events as SoLAR LASI Locals - Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI) in cooperation with SoLAR. In this panel, five organizers will share their experiences building relationships among educators, technologists, researchers, enterprise and policy makers at a local level. Considering that the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the need for creating events and experiences remotely or throughout hybrid format, this panel will also discuss the benefits and challenges experienced during these times.
Panelists: (short bios below)
Dr. Alejandra Martínez Monés, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
LASI Spain
Dr. Jorge Maldonado-Mahauad, Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador
LALA Community
Dr. Olga Viberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Nordic LASI
Dr. Rebecca Ferguson, The Open University, UK
LASI Locals & LACE Project
Dr. Simon Buckingham Shum, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
LASI-Locals & ALASI
Dr. Alejandra Martínez Monés, Department of Computer Science, GSIC/EMIC Group, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain.
Alejandra Martínez Monés is Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Computer Science Department at Universidad de Valladolid (Spain). She is a member of the interdisciplinary research group GSIC (Intelligent and Collaborative Systems). Her research is framed in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning, with a focus on the role of learning analytics in providing support to teachers’ pedagogical innovations in different educational situations (CSCL, Ubiquitous Learning, MOOCs, etc.) She is a member of the Spanish Network on Learning Analytics (SNOLA) and was the chairperson of LASI Spain 2020.
Dr. Jorge Maldonado-Mahauad, Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador.
Jorge Maldonado is a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Cuenca. He received a PhD in Engineering Sciences at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His work has focused on scientific advances that seek to improve teaching and learning processes in face-to-face, hybrid and online environments, through the development and application of pedagogical methodologies combined with the use of Artificial Intelligence.He is the coordinator for Latin America of the LALA Community, from where he has promoted the creation of a network of more than 250 researchers from 80 Latin American institutions and carrying out the development of the first three Learning Analytics conferences in Latin America.
Dr. Olga Viberg, School of Electric Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.
Olga is Associate Professor in Media Technology with specialisation in Technology-Enhanced Learning at the School of Electric Engineering and Computer Science in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Viberg's fields of expertise include a focus on learning analytics in higher education, mobile assisted language learning, the integration of formal and informal learning environments, design for learning, a particular focus on measuring and supporting students’ self-regulated learning, and students' privacy in online learning settings. Her work has been published in many referred journals and conferences. She is an active member of the Nordic network in learning analytics and the main organizer of the Nordic LASI in 2021.
Dr. Rebecca Ferguson,The Open University, UK.
Rebecca is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at The Open University in the UK, and a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her primary research interests are educational futures and how people learn together online. Rebecca has been invited to lead events in this area on five continents, including LASI locals in Australia, Korea, Spain and Norway; plus several events associated with her work as a principal investigator on the European Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE) and on LAEP, a project that helped European policymakers to set out an agenda for stimulating ways of learning and teaching through the use of learning analytics.
Dr. Simon Buckingham Shum, Professor of Learning Informatics, and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney.
Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics, and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. Involved with LASIs since Stanford 2013, he coordinated the international LASI-Locals network for several years, and since moving to Sydney in 2014, has chaired/contributed to annual ALASIs, which are the largest LASI-Locals outside the US.