MOOCs: A multi-faceted phenomenon

Based on George Siemens’ recent criticism of educational technology, we propose some reflections on the positioning of the EMMA project, European Multiple MOOC Aggregator, with respect to the future of Higher Education in Europe

Designing for Flipped Teaching and Learning: leveraging the potential of learning analytics and gamification

Workshop presentatio

Re-organization of assessment during the educational emergency in primary and secondary teaching: an Italian case

The educational crisis caused by the pandemic created an unprecedented need to reorganize teaching and learning processes, and the educational assessment became one of the thorniest issues in this rapid change; assessment reorganization entails layered complexities on micro, meso and macro levels. This research is contextualized in a larger digital ethnographic study of three different Italian teacher online communities, uncovering the experience from mixedmethods research. Following this research, a survey instrument was developed and launched. Current paper reports on the survey aiming to uncover the change in assessment practices during the educational emergency while reflecting on teachers’ beliefs on the assessment, the use of remote assessment methods before and during the pandemic, and its re-organization. Findings suggest a significant reorganization of assessment during the COVID-19 educational emergency in all school orders. Through all school orders, teachers perceived a reduction in the importance of assessment during the pandemic and, consequently, used most assessment techniques significantly less than before. However, different methods changed differently, with oral examinations diminishing dramatically and increased use of closed-question quizzes

How to Aggregate Lesson Observation Data into Learning Analytics Datasets?

The technological environment that supports the learning process tends to be the main data source for Learning Analytics. However, this trend leaves out those parts of the learning process that are not computer-mediated. To overcome this problem, involving additional data gathering techniques such as ambient sensors, audio and video recordings, or even observations could enrich datasets. This paper focuses on how the data extracted from the observations can be integrated with data coming from activity tracking, resulting in a multimodal dataset. The paper identifies the need for theoretical and pedagogical semantics in multimodal learning analytics, and examines the xAPI potential for the multimodal data gathering and aggregation. Finally, we propose an approach for pedagogy-driven observational data identification. As a proof of concept, we have applied the approach in two research works where observations had been used to enrich or triangulate the results obtained for traditional data sources. Through these examples, we illustrate some of the challenges that multimodal dataset may present when including observational dat

MOOCs: A multi-faceted phenomenon

Based on George Siemens’ recent criticism of educational technology, we propose some reflections on the positioning of the EMMA project, European Multiple MOOC Aggregator, with respect to the future of Higher Education in Europe