Affordances and limitations of learning analytics for computer-assisted language learning: a case study of the VITAL project

Learning analytics (LA) has emerged as a field that offers promising new ways to support failing or weaker students, prevent drop-out and aid retention. However, other research suggests that large datasets of learner activity can be used to understand online learning behaviour and improve pedagogy. While the use of LA in language learning has received little attention to date, available research suggests that understanding language learner behaviour could provide valuable insights into task design for instructors and materials designers, as well as help students with effective learning strategies and personalised learning pathways. This paper first discusses previous research in the field of language learning and teaching based on learner tracking and the specific affordances of LA for CALL, as well as its inherent limitations and challenges. The second part of the paper analyses data arising from the European Commission (EC) funded VITAL project that adopted a bottom-up pedagogical approach to LA and implemented learner activity tracking in different blended or distance learning settings. Referring to data arising from 285 undergraduate students on a Business French course at Hasselt University which used a flipped classroom design, statistical and process-mining techniques were applied to map and visualise actual uses of online learning resources over the course of one semester. Results suggested that most students planned their self-study sessions in accordance with the flipped classroom design, both in terms of their timing of online activity and selection of contents. Other metrics measuring active online engagement – a crucial component of successful flipped learning - indicated significant differences between successful and non-successful students. Meaningful learner patterns were revealed in the data, visualising students’ paths through the online learning environment and uses of the different activity types. The research implied that valuable insights for instructors, course designers and students can be acquired based on the tracking and analysis of language learner data and the use of visualisation and process-mining tools

The biggest business process management problems to solve before we die

It may be tempting for researchers to stick to incremental extensions of their current work to plan future research activities. Yet there is also merit in realizing the grand challenges in one’s field. This paper presents an overview of the nine major research problems for the Business Process Management discipline. These challenges have been collected by an open call to the community, discussed and refined in a workshop setting, and described here in detail, including a motivation why these problems are worth investigating. This overview may serve the purpose of inspiring both novice and advanced scholars who are interested in the radical new ideas for the analysis, design, and management of work processes using information technology

A combined approach for analysing heuristic algorithms

When developing optimisation algorithms, the focus often lies on obtaining an algorithm that is able to outperform other existing algorithms for some performance measure. It is not common practice to question the reasons for possible performance differences observed. These types of questions relate to evaluating the impact of the various heuristic parameters and often remain unanswered. In this paper, the focus is on gaining insight in the behaviour of a heuristic algorithm by investigating how the various elements operating within the algorithm correlate with performance, obtaining indications of which combinations work well and which do not, and how all these effects are influenced by the specific problem instance the algorithm is solving. We consider two approaches for analysing algorithm parameters and components—functional analysis of variance and multilevel regression analysis—and study the benefits of using both approaches jointly. We present the results of a combined methodology that is able to provide more insights than when the two approaches are used separately. The illustrative case studies in this paper analyse a large neighbourhood search algorithm applied to the vehicle routing problem with time windows and an iterated local search algorithm for the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times.PostprintPeer reviewe

A Rational Risk Policy? Why Path Dependence Matters

The Kelly criterion determines optimal bet sizes that maximize long-term growth. While growth is definitely an important consideration, the focus on growth alone can lead to significant drawdowns, leading to psychological discomfort for a risk-taker. Path-dependent risk measures, such as drawdown risk, provide a means to assess the risk of significant portfolio retracements. In this paper, we provide a flexible framework for assessing path dependent risk for a trading or investment operation. Given a certain set of profitable trading characteristics, a risk-taker who maximizes expected growth can still be faced with significant drawdowns to the point where a strategy becomes unsustainable. We demonstrate, through a series of experiments, the importance of path dependent risks in the case of outcomes subject to various return distributions. Based on Monte Carlo simulation, we analyze the medium-term behavior of different cumulative return paths and study the impact of different return outcome distributions. We show that in the case of heavier tailed outcomes, extra care is needed, and optimal might not be so optimal in the end

Mining Recency–Frequency–Monetary enriched insights into resources’ collaboration behavior from event data

Organizations increasingly rely on teamwork to achieve their goals. Therefore they continuously strive to improve their teams as their performance is interwoven with that of the organization. To implement beneficial changes, accurate insights into the working of the team are necessary. However, team leaders tend to have an understanding of the team's collaboration that is subjective and seldom completely accurate. Recently there has been an increase in the adoption of digital support systems for collaborative work that capture objective data on how the work took place in reality. This creates the opportunity for data-driven extraction of insights into the collaboration behavior of a team. This data however, does not explicitly record the collaboration relationships, which many existing techniques expect as input. Therefore, these relationships first have to be discovered. Existing techniques that apply discovery are not generally applicable because their notion of collaboration is tailored to the application domain. Moreover, the information that these techniques extract from the data about the nature of the relationships is often limited to the network level. Therefore, this research proposes a generic algorithm that can discover collaboration relationships between resources from event data on any collaborative project. The algorithm adopts an established framework to provide insights into collaboration on a fine-grained level. To this end, three properties are calculated for both the resources and their collaboration relationships: a recency, frequency, and monetary value. The technique's ability to provide valuable insights into the team structure and characteristics is empirically validated on two use cases

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps with Rough Concepts

Part 12: First Workshop on Fuzzy Cognitive Maps Theory and Applications (FCMTA 2013)International audienceArtificial Intelligence has always followed the idea of using computers for the task of modelling human behaviour, with the aim of assisting decision making processes. Scientists and researchers have developed knowledge representations to formalize and organize such human behaviour and knowledge management, allowing for easy translation from the real world, so that the computers can work as if they were “humans”. Some techniques that are common used for modelling real problems are Rough Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Artificial Neural Networks. In this paper we propose a new approach for knowledge representation founded basically on Rough Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, improving flexibility in modelling problems where data is characterized by a high degree of vagueness. A case study about modelling Travel Behaviour is analysed and results are assessed

A framework to evaluate and compare decision-mining techniques

\u3cp\u3eDuring the last decade several decision mining techniques have been developed to discover the decision perspective of a process from an event log. The increasing number of decision mining techniques raises the importance of evaluating the quality of the discovered decision models and/or decision logic. Currently, the evaluations are limited because of the small amount of available event logs with decision information. To alleviate this limitation, this paper introduces the ‘DataExtend’ technique that allows evaluating and comparing decision-mining techniques with each other, using a sufficient number of event logs and process models to generate evaluation results that are statistically significant. This paper also reports on an initial evaluation using ‘DataExtend’ that involves two techniques to discover decisions, whose results illustrate that the approach can serve the purpose.\u3c/p\u3