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CIC's director Simon Buckingham Shum delivered two keynote addresses recently, framing AI as thinking tools in the context of the global polycrisis... In his talks to the Societal Impact of AI Symposium at UNSW Sydney, and the international Online Teacher Education Conference, Simon argues that the societal and educational implications of significantly degraded/collapsing, interacting systems are profound, and education is called to equip our students for this. It is in this context that dialog...
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"Learner flourishing" is a wholistic concept that reflects current concerns that education must cultivate the whole person for the turbulent times ahead. A special issue dedicated to how this intersects with AI has just come out... There is growing emphasis on flourishing as a fundamental concept for our times, possibly more helpful than "sustainability" as argued by John Ehrenfeld: "flourishing — the attainment of the full potential of living creatures." When it comes to learners, Frank Ma...
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Don't blame the AI: you're accountable for your work! "VivaBuddy" aims to help students check they haven't outsourced too much thinking when they co-author with AI. Mohsen Ebrahimzadeh is a doctoral researcher in the Transdisciplinary School, supervised by Antonette Shibani and CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum, supported by CIC Specialist Software Engineer Andrey Inkin. As we move into an era when undetectable AI is both deepening and undermining thinking and writing, regardless of how much AI ma...
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Learning analytics offers promising solutions for personalising student learning and support, yet adoption remains limited due to implementation challenges and unclear impact. The missing piece? Learning design, which provides the context needed to transform data into meaningful insights into students’ learning. CIC's Lecturer Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim addresses this gap in teaching her subject Crunch: Learning Analytics for Performance and Improvement, part of the Graduate Certificate of Learning ...
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Yuveena Gopalan's doctoral research is studying how successful researchers learnt their craft. The first major publication from her PhD has just come out, distilling the insights from interviews into a conceptual framework. Strange as it may seem, relatively little is known about how academic researchers learn. Yes there are training courses to build specific skills, but all the evidence from workplace learning studies shows that this is not how professionals in other sectors learn. Co-supervis...
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The Learning Analytics field is now a teenager, having launched in 2011. With the explosive rise of GenAI, this seemed a good moment for the community to reflect on where we need to go. CIC's Kirsty Kitto co-chaired a whole day workshop to wrangle this... Assoc. Prof. Kirsty Kitto co-led a stimulating international workshop entitled, What are the Grand Challenges of Learning Analytics? as part of the International Conference on Learning Analytics. The mission: In line with the conference t...
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Our research stream into Belonging Analytics has been putting a new platform through its paces in a pilot study... We're delighted to share a new development in our Belonging Analytics research program, after piloting the SenseMaker® platform. We design a SenseMaker framework grounded in theories of belonging, to identify key dimensions, indicators, and factors of belonging. Story prompts invite students to share a story or an experience that made them feel that they belong or do not be...
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Could we develop trustworthy "Belonging Analytics" from AI analysis of students' reflective writing? There's growing interest in the use of large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Gemini and Claude to assist with qualitative data analysis. In this work, we develop and evaluate a methodology to prompt GPT to perform theory-based deductive coding of student reflective writing. CIC PhD candidate Sriram Ramanathan is focused on what learning analytics can tell us about university students' se...
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