Learning Analytics in Collaborative Online Lab Environments: A Systematic Scoping Review

With the increase in online education arises the challenge of replicating physical laboratories and teamwork online. This poster presents a brief overview of a scoping review of the current research within the area of learning analytics and collaboration in online laboratory environments, including results on the used learning analytics method. A gap of knowledge in the current research where there is a lack of research addressing this topic has been identified. This calls for the need of further research within this area.publishedVersio

Horizon Report Europe - 2014 Schools Edition

The NMC Horizon Project from the New Media Consortium is a long-term investigation launched in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe. The NMC Horizon Report Europe: 2014 Schools Edition, the first of its kind for Europe, examines six key trends, six significant challenges and six important developments in educational technology that are very likely to impact educational change processes in European schools over the next five years (2014-2018). The topics within each section were carefully selected by the Horizon Project Europe Expert Panel, a body of 53 experts in European education, technology, and other fields. They come from 22 European countries, as well as international organisations and European networks. Throughout the report, references and links are made to more than 150 European publications (reports, articles, policy documents, blog posts etc.), projects (both EU-funded and national initiatives) and various policy initiatives from all over Europe. The Creative Classrooms multidimensional framework, developed by European Commission’s JRC-IPTS on behalf of DG EAC, was used for analysing the trends, challenges and technologies impacting European schools over the next five years. The analysis reveals that a systemic approach is needed for integrating new technologies in European schools and impacting educational change over the next five years.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition

The NMC Horizon Report > 2017 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This 14th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. The three key sections of this report constitute a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe. All of the topics were selected by an expert panel that represented a range of backgrounds and perspectives

Who is in the sample? An analysis of real and surrogate users as participants in user study research in the information technology fields

Background Constructing a sample of real users as participants in user studies is considered by most researchers to be vital for the validity, usefulness, and applicability of research findings. However, how often user studies reported in information technology academic literature sample real users or surrogate users is unknown. Therefore, it is uncertain whether or not the use of surrogate users in place of real users is a widespread problem within user study practice. Objective To determine how often user studies reported in peer-reviewed information technology literature sample real users or surrogate users as participants. Method We analyzed 725 user studies reported in 628 peer-reviewed articles published from 2013 through 2021 in 233 unique conference and journal outlets, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science archives. To study the sample selection choices, we categorized each study as generic (i.e., users are from the general population) or targeted (i.e., users are from a specific subpopulation), and the sampled study participants as real users (i.e., from the study population) or surrogate users (i.e., other than real users). Results Our analysis of all 725 user studies shows that roughly two-thirds (75.4%) sampled real users. However, of the targeted studies, only around half (58.4%) sampled real users. Of the targeted studies sampling surrogate users, the majority (69.7%) used students, around one-in-four (23.6%) sampled through crowdsourcing, and the remaining 6.7% of studies used researchers or did not specify who the participants were. Conclusions Key findings are as follows: (a) the state of sampling real users in information technology research has substantial room for improvement for targeted studies; (b) researchers often do not explicitly characterize their study participants in adequate detail, which is probably the most disconcerting finding; and (c) suggestions are provided for recruiting real users, which may be challenging for researchers. Implications The results imply a need for standard guidelines for reporting the types of users sampled for a user study. We provide a template for reporting user study sampling with examples.© 2022 Salminen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Computer Science) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework 2016-2025

SRF, strategy and results framework, strateg

Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do businesses in local languages, including for those who cannot read and write. Unfortunately, these audio datasets are not fully exploited by current MI tools, leaving several Africans out of MI business opportunities. Additionally, many state-of-the-art MI models are not culture-aware, and the ethics of their adoption indexes are questionable. The lack thereof is a major drawback in many applications in Africa. This paper summarizes recent developments in machine intelligence in Africa from a multi-layer multiscale and culture-aware ethics perspective, showcasing MI use cases in 54 African countries through 400 articles on MI research, industry, government actions, as well as uses in art, music, the informal economy, and small businesses in Africa. The survey also opens discussions on the reliability of MI rankings and indexes in the African continent as well as algorithmic definitions of unclear terms used in MI.Comment: Accepted and to be presented at DSAI 202

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Educational visions: The lessons from 40 years of innovation

Educational Visions looks to future developments in educational technology by reviewing our history of computers and education, covering themes such as learning analytics and design, inquiry learning, citizen science, inclusion, and learning at scale. The book shows how successful innovations can be built over time, informs readers about current practice and demonstrates how they can use this work themselves. This book is intended for anyone who is involved in the study and practice of technology-enhanced learning. It includes examples from informal learning such as MOOCs and citizen science, as well as higher education. Although the foundations of this work are in the UK, its influence has spread worldwide, so it will be of interest internationally