News

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...
Read More

Learning Analytics is full of situations where features essential to understanding the learning process cannot be measured. In this work, doctoral candidate Ben Hicks and Kirsty Kitto propose an approach... Hicks, B., & Kitto, K. (2025). Game Theoretic Models of Intangible Learning Data. Proceedings of the 15th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, Dublin, IRE.  https://doi.org/10.1145/3706468.3706557 Learning Analytics is full of situations where features essential...
Read More

Doctoral Consortia can be transformational experiences for PhD candidates. But what makes them work well, and how do you evaluate their impact? CIC's team have been involved for over a decade in both leading and participating in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. Here's our analysis of how it functions as induction into the community of practice — joint work by CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum and Yuveena Gopalan, working with Rebecca Fer...
Read More

CIC was delighted to convene a small group of academics and PhD students to meet with Professor Rupert Wegerif, Director of the Digital Education Futures Initiative at Cambridge University. Prof. Wegerif brings decades of research into the centrality of dialogue and dialogic learning,  his last two books being The Theory of Educational Technology: Towards a Dialogic Foundation for Design (with Louis Major), and Rethinking Educational Theory: Education as Expanding Dialogue. Over 2.5 hours,...
Read More

The Student Voices on AI in HE project is a multi-university collaboration to give university students a voice in how they are making sense of the generative AI revolution. CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum and Lisa Lim have been working with other UTS colleagues (Jan McLean, Nicole Pepperell, Antonette Shibani) to design and run a survey with >8000 students, and focus groups with 79 students. The project's results are gradually being released as we crunch the huge amounts of quantitative an...
Read More

Doctoral researcher Ram Ramanathan recently presented his PhD work on Belonging Analytics, an emerging concept that we are developing here in CIC. Here's the replay/paper/slides from the international Learning Analytics conference at the Kyoto International Conference Center, and below are his personal reflections on this trip! Sriram Ramanathan, Simon Buckingham Shum, and Lisa-Angelique Lim. 2024. To what extent do responses to a single survey question provide insights into students' sen...
Read More

Kirsty Kitto (CIC Assoc. Prof. Data Science) has a new paper critically examining visions of the "Skills Passport", and identifying two key challenges that must be overcome for such a concept to become reality. In the light of the Australian Universities Accord report, this could not be more timely to inform the debate. Here's the latest work she will present at UMAP24 — the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users, t...
Read More