News

We need new ways to describe students’ readiness for university. Joining an exciting initiative led by the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, CIC has helped hundreds of high school students from some of the toughest economic areas in Sydney, who are now about to start at UTS. The U@Uni Academy is a pioneering initiative led by the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, to expand the pathways into a UTS education. U@Uni Academy is an alternate, non-ATAR entry pathway to stu...
Read More

Students need timely and personalised feedback to know how to improve, as well as to build a sense of belonging that fosters motivation. But how is this possible with large enrolment numbers and when all, or a significant amount, of learning is online? Automated Feedback broadly refers to software’s ability to process data about student activity and convert this into feedback messages. There are many approaches to this, involving both learning analytics, and for more advanced analysis of the da...
Read More

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...
Read More

CIC front-end developer Joseph Jung isn’t just a user interface coding whizz: he also just received his PhD! Joseph Jung is currently working at CIC as a front-end developer on the TRACK project. He has multiple roles at CIC including User Experience design and user interface development. But before joining CIC he was completing his PhD at the University of Sydney, on improving the usefulness and usability of a mobile app for “food journaling”. His key research contributions were to define Lock...
Read More

As some of you may know, TRACK is a suite of web apps to help students, academics, course designers and working professionals understand how skills, studying and careers intersect. Here’s the latest news on this exciting project! Some UTS students know what they want to be, but don’t know what they need to study to get to their goal. Others know what they’re interested in or good at but can’t quite work out how to link subject choices to potential career outcomes. TRACK can help students to mak...
Read More

We are delighted to announce that Dr Alireza Ahadi has joined CIC as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Welcome! I completed my PhD degree in computer science education research with a focus on learning analytics in 2017 at University of Technology Sydney. The thesis titled Data Analytics and Novice Programmer was mainly formed around exploring data deriven approaches to exhaust the potential of data analytics in revealing learning patterns in novice programmer’s programming source-code snapshot d...
Read More

The International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge next week is the premier gathering in the field, with double-blind peer review of full papers, and the proceedings archived in the ACM Digital Library, the leading repository for peer reviewed research in the computing sciences. As usual, CIC will be very active this year, contributing to diverse events. Here’s your one-stop-shop to track down the team, who will welcome a chat with you about their work!... The pre-conference ...
Read More

We are delighted to announce that Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim has joined CIC as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Welcome! I completed my PhD in education with a focus on learning analytics in early 2021, at the University of South Australia. My dissertation, entitled Examining the impact of feedback based on learning analytics from the perspective of self-regulated learning, explored how students made sense of automated feedback personalised to their own learning data. My dissertation also explored th...
Read More

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...
Read More