News

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 des...
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CIC has been working closely with UTS Research, to help develop the roadmap and requirements for future systems to support researcher capability development. “Learning” isn’t just what students do in degrees, it’s now a lifelong process, certainly for professionals, and increasingly for citizens simply to stay up to date with the pace of societal change. A key group of working professionals at any university is, of course, academic researchers, who have their own career trajectories and choic...
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How well do you cope with uncertainty and ambiguity? Do you need a language to think about your readiness? We’re scaling up support resources for the Learning Journeys tool. Previous stories have given updates on the Learning Journeys tool, deployed at UTS as part of the long term research program led by Ruth Crick on “learning dispositions”. As the CIC research project page explains:  “Learning Dispositions are attracting significant attention within educational research, and refer to the ...
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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. While the pandemic has driven a lot of teaching online, certain forms of learning are impossible to replicate virtually. Hopefully, as we gradually return to campus, students and teachers will once again enjoy the unique energy and experience of being together, working as a team, and using our bodies as well a...
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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. The British All Party Parliamentary Group on AI is a multi-year initiative to help anticipate the widespread impacts that AI could have on society. They convene Evidence Sessions on different themes, in which Lords and MPs have the opportunity to hear from, and question, diverse experts. CIC Directo...
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CIC has created engaging online modules and runs regular workshops to help diverse learners get hands-on with data and analytics. Engaging online modules  Building data literacy is now one of the most important qualities in today’s degree programs, and the workplace. CIC has published several engaging, short modules that help learners get hands-on with analysing data, and thinking about the ethical dimensions. These modules, on UTS Open, are being used by the public for free, by UTS students a...
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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. Almost every week a new report hits the streets, analysing the impact that AI could have on the future of work. Many are over-blown in their predictions, but we can see the changes even now, as the routine cognitive work aspects of jobs are gradually auto...
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The goal of Leonie Payne’s PhD thesis — “Bringing Rigour to the Evaluation of Higher Education” — is to provide a sounder theoretical and statistical foundation for the analysis of student evaluations of teaching, gathered the world-over from student surveys. She’s developing a mathematical and conceptual model of bias that will assist those designing and analysing surveys to understand where and how bias may creep into the survey methodology used. Leonie has demonstrated how Monte Carlo resampl...
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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 Martin...
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We bade a sad farewell today to Ming Liu, as amid the pressure COVID19 lockdown, he managed to catch a flight back to his home, family, and a faculty position in China. Ming specialised in Writing Analytics, supporting our long term R&D program for AcaWriter. In particular, he brought expertise in machine learning from reflecting writing texts, so as well as supporting academics in faculties to introduce AcaWriter to their students, he was also inventing next generation technology that will ...
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