Author: newseditor

CIC's long term work with Cherie Lucas (School of Pharmacy) was the focus of a workshop last week at the 13th International Conference on Life Long Learning in Pharmacy, joint with Efi Mantzourani (Cardiff U.) sharing what we have been learning about the effective use of AcaWriter's automated feedback to support reflective writing. Full details below, including the slides. Lucas, C., Buckingham Shum, S. & Mantzourani, E. (2021). The Art of Reflection: Provisions and Companions in our Profes...
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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, launched by the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), conceived and co-edited by CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum, with Melanie Peffer from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nexus is, as the name suggests, a meeting place to connect. Especially for time-poor educators and analytics designe...
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This exciting new video captures the way that CIC works with faculty academics to identify teaching and learning challenges, co-design new forms of automated feedback, powered by data and analytics, and deliver this via engaging user interfaces. This work comes from the PhD work of Vanessa Echeverria, who recently graduated from CIC, and building on this, the ongoing PhD of Gloria Fernandez-Nieto. Congratulations to them on this ground-breaking work, and to their supervisors (Roberto Martine...
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We're delighted to announce that CIC's Kirsty Kitto led the writing of a new Position paper from the Society for Learning Analytics Research. Building on her extensive expertise, she was joined by other industry leaders, analysing 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. Creating Data for Learning Analytics Ecosystems Authors: Kirsty Kitto, John Whitmer, Aaron E. ...
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Academic Writing has distinctive hallmarks that reflect the importance placed on critical thinking, argument and reflection. It's also tough to learn. Now AI can provide instant feedback — even on your 17th draft, at 3am... Those of you who follow CIC's work will know that over the last 5 years, we've been refining an automated feedback tool tuned for academic writing, called AcaWriter. We're delighted to say that we've recently announced its release to all UTS students! [retweet] While the pri...
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National bushfires. A global pandemic. Global social unrest. The disruption of higher education. And 2020 hasn't even reached half-time. When the only constant is change, we need a distinctive set of personal qualities to adapt and thrive. But how do we talk about those qualities? Can we meaningfully assess them? And what does it look like when leadership values these qualities? A long-standing stream of research has studied the dispositions, or 'habits of mind', that equip us with an openness t...
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Research is fuelled by academics connecting through high quality, peer reviewed conferences — all of which had to shift online this year due to the pandemic. CIC was out in force, albeit into the small hours on some occasions!... For CIC, the International Conference on Learning Analytics is a primary venue — and notably, No.6 and the only conference in Google Scholar's impact rankings for Educational Technology. As usual, CIC had a strong presence with our academics and students contributing pa...
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CIC Doctoral Researcher Sophie Abel specialises in academic writing, and has just published a free course on UTS Open, entitled "Writing an Abstract". Writing an Abstract is about an hour’s tutorial introducing the hallmarks of a good abstract, including a wide range of engaging interactive exercises. The course is based on Sophie’s PhD who brings her expertise in Academic Language & Learning to the challenge of designing automated feedback on writing. The course concepts are carried through...
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