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January 2021

Welcome to the CIC newsletter!

If we ever needed a reminder of the military acronym VUCA in action, 2020 was it, with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity in spades.

The higher education sector's been hit hard the world over, no less in Australia. To ride out continuous white water, however, requires having a point on the horizon to aim for. UTS has a 2027 Strategy that sets our bearings, which includes in its priorities the better use of data to help us understand our past, present and future.

In this newsletter, reflecting on July-Dec 2020, you'll learn how CIC is contributing to this mission, by equipping students, academics and professional staff with the capabilities they need, through the use of human-centred tools powered by analytics and AI.

At a glance...
  • Preparing lifelong learners for future careers
  • Building data and analytics literacy
  • Ensuring automated feedback is pedagogically sound
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  • Analytics for face-to-face, embodied learning
  • Scaling up “Learning Power” for students and staff
  • A new blog to distill learning analytics insights in digestible chunks
  • Creating data for learning analytics ecosystems
  • Expert input to government policy consultations
  • Visualisation to support researchers' professional learning
We hope you enjoy these stories and dive deeper with the follow-up links. Don't hesitate to connect with us at cic@uts.edu.au

Simon Buckingham Shum
Professor of Learning Informatics
Director, Connected Intelligence Centre

HUMAN-CENTRED ANALYTICS FOR LIFELONG LEARNERS: STUDENTS, ACADEMICS, STAFF

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Preparing lifelong learners for future careers

How ready is Australia for the changes that AI will bring? This will require learning at many levels of society, and CIC is working on a next generation tool to provide learning/careers guidance, as well as co-chairing a national conference.

Read on ...
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Building data and analytics literacy

CIC has created engaging online modules introducing data analysis, and runs regular workshops for academics to get hands-on with writing analytics.

Read on ...
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Ensuring automated feedback is pedagogically sound

Feedback to students can be motivating and incisive, or crushing! So how do we design automated feedback based on the best design principles? We brought together some of the best minds for 2 days.

Read on ...
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Analytics for face-to-face learning

Despite the online revolution, many forms of learning require collocated, embodied expertise. CIC is at the forefront of techniques to provide automated feedback on collocated teamwork.

Read on ...
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Scaling up “Learning Power” for students and staff

How well do you cope with uncertainty and ambiguity? Do you have a language to think about your readiness? We’re scaling up support resources for the Learning Journeys tool for students and all staff.

Read on ...
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NEXUS blog: serving fresh digestible insights for designing effective learning analytics

With the explosion in Learning Analytics as a research field and commercial market, it can be hard to find the gems, especially for time-poor educators and analytics designers. Nexus is a new blog, with stories from the experts

Read on ...
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Creating data for learning analytics ecosystems

CIC’s Kirsty Kitto led the writing of a new Position Paper from the Society for Learning Analytics Research. This analyses key challenges facing the field, motivating a set of recommendations for discussion, to enable data about student activity to flow between systems for true interoperability

Read on ...
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Expert input to government policy consultations

Governments are preparing for the impact of data, analytics and AI. Learn how CIC is contributing to current Australian and UK strategy consultations around the implications for societal learning.

Read on ...
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Visualisation to support researchers’ professional learning

CIC has been working closely with UTS Research, to help develop the roadmap and requirements for future systems to support researcher capability development.

Read on ...

CIC TEAM NEWS

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Welcome Ben Hicks, our newest PhD candidate!

We’re delighted to announce that Ben Hicks has joined our Learning Analytics Doctoral Program

Read on ...
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Congratulations Dr Carlos Prieto-Alvarez! Learning Analytics Co-Design PhD

We’re delighted to announce that Carlos Prieto-Alvarez has graduated from our Learning Analytics Doctoral Program

Read on ...
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Congratulations Leonie Payne! How does bias impact student evaluations of teaching?

What are the limitations of statistical methodologies used to analyse student feedback in national surveys like QILT? How could they be more robust? Doctoral researcher Leonie Payne is working on it

Read on ...
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Farewell Ming Liu

Another team change, as postdoctoral research fellow Ming Liu returns to China to take up a faculty position. Ming's worked for over 2 years with us, supporting academics to help them integrate writing analytics, and developing machine learning.

Read on ...
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Farewell Andrei Maslennikov

We bid au revoir to Andrei Maslennikov who graduated from UTS Master of IT, working in CIC as an intern, and then as a developer. We thank him for his contributions to a range of CIC software projects, and wish him all the very best as he moves out of academia into a commercial programming role.
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