8 research outputs found
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Analysis of student behaviour in habitable worlds using continuous representation visualization
We introduce a novel approach to visualizing temporal clickstream behaviour in the context of a degree-satisfying online course, Habitable Worlds, offered through Arizona State University. The current practice for visualizing behaviour within a digital learning environment is to generate plots based on hand-engineered or coded features using domain knowledge. While this approach has been effective in relating behaviour to known phenomena, features crafted from domain knowledge are not likely well suited to making unfamiliar phenomena salient and thus can preclude discovery. We introduce a methodology for organically surfacing behavioural regularities from clickstream data, conducting an expert in-the-loop hyperparameter search, and identifying anticipated as well as newly discovered patterns of behaviour. While these visualization techniques have been used before in the broader machine-learning community to better understand neural networks and relationships between word vectors, we apply them to online behavioural learner data and go a step further, exploring the impact of the parameters of the model on producing tangible, non-trivial observations of behaviour that suggest pedagogical improvement to the course designers and instructors. The methodology introduced in this paper led to an improved understanding of passing and non-passing student behaviour in the course and is applicable to other datasets of clickstream activity where investigators and stakeholders wish to organically surface principal patterns of behaviour
Planetary Caves: A Solar System View of Processes and Products
We provide the first solar system wide compendium of speleogenic processes and products. An examination of 15 solar system bodies revealed that six cave-forming processes occur beyond Earth including volcanic (cryo and magmatic), fracturing (tectonic and impact melt), dissolution, sublimation, suffusion, and landslides. Although no caves (i.e., confirmed entrances with associated linear passages) have been confirmed, 3,545 SAPs (subsurface access points) have been identified on 11 planetary bodies and the potential for speleogenic processes (and thus SAPs) was observed on an additional four planetary bodies. The bulk of our knowledge on extraterrestrial SAPs is based on global databases for the Moon and Mars, which are bodies for which high-resolution imagery and other data are available. To further characterize most of the features beyond the Moon and Mars, acquisition (preferably global coverage) and subsequent analysis of high-resolution imagery will be required. The next few decades hold considerable promise for further identifying and characterizing caves across the solar system