News

CIC’s work with the Health Faculty has hit a new milestone. As nurses work in teams in an experimental version of the simulation ward, they are now generating data streams from sensors detecting their position, patient treatment actions and arousal levels. A student observer watching the team also logs more complex actions on an iPad that cannot be automatically sensed. This generates a rich dataset of the team’s performance, and in an earlier story we reported the validation of a first prototyp...
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In response to the changing demands on citizens and the workforce, educational institutions are starting to shift their teaching and learning towards equipping students with knowledge, skills and dispositions that prepare them for lifelong learning. These have been termed 21st Century skills/competencies, Core/Soft Skills, General Capabilities, Graduate Attributes, etc. There is now a lot of activity in the school and higher education sectors tackling the challenge of tracking and assessing thes...
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Evaluative Judgement has been identified as a key graduate competency by UTS Emeritus Professor Dave Boud, one of the world’s leading experts on the future of assessment in higher education. This is a lifelong skill worth having — if your judgements about the quality of your own, or a peer’s work, are close to what an expert would say, you’re doing well. But how do you build this valuable ability? The answer is through a mix of skilful teaching and assessment design (the focus of Boud’s research...
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CIC data-scientist Dr Michael Pracy was invited to give one of the five workshops at the recent X-sensing conference held in Coffs Harbor. His workshop, titled: Dynamic Dashboards and Visualization Using Python, was cantered around the open-source infrastructure he developed at CIC for building and deploying demonstrator data-visualization dashboards for internal analytics projects at UTS. The conference was multi-disciplinary and aimed at data-focused scientists and educators. It was attended b...
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Human-centred software design gives all stakeholders an active voice in the design of the systems that they are expected to use. However, this is not yet commonplace in Learning Analytics. Co-design techniques from other domains have much to offer in principle, but in fact there are few detailed accounts of exactly how well such techniques work for learning analytics. CIC Doctoral Researcher Carlos Prieto-Alvarez has developed a deck of cards for Learning Analytics design, called LA-DECK. Like ...
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The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) is a national advocate for action to reduce poverty and inequality, and the peak body for the community services sector in Australia. Verity Firth, Director of the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, convenes an Annual Policy Dialogue to support ACOSS and explore potential collaborations. CIC's Kirsty Kitto and Simon Buckingham Shum joined this year’s forum, briefing ACOSS on AI and its ethical dimensions, as they grapple with the impli...
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CIC is collaborating with the Academic Language and Literacy Team from IML and UTS International to support the development of academic literacy for UTS students. All commencing UTS students are required to undertake the OPELA (Online Post-Enrolment Language Assessment), or an in-class written diagnostic task. This test provides students with a rating of their academic language skills. Academic language skills are an essential foundation for learning and ongoing language development at universit...
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Post Ed Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, and myriad other widely covered data privacy breaches and examples of biased machine learning, citizens are rightly concerned about whether this emerging infrastructure will be used for good or ill. While education is a social good, it cannot of course, remain remote from this debate. CIC builds data-powered infrastructure, so this is core business for us. We're engaged locally, nationally and internationally, engaging audiences ranging from curious citizens...
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At the ALASI conference held at University of Wollongong on 29th November, Leonie Payne, Kirsty Kitto and Mike Pracy hosted a panel debate on the provocation “Student evaluations of teaching are the worst form of evaluation except for all of the others”. A lively debate ensued with the affirmative winning the contest convincingly. The post-debate discussions provided some thoughtful reflections on how the Learning Analytics community can make a valid contribution to policy discussions on the use...
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The Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute (ALASI) is the major forum in Australia for advancing discussion, knowledge and innovation in the domain of learning analytics. CIC Research Fellow Dr. Ming Liu co-chaired the Fifth Writing Analytics Workshop: Linking Reflective Writing Analytics to Learning Design, co-organized with UTS colleagues Sumati Ahuja (UTS Business School) and Rosalie Goldsmith (Academic Language and Learning, IML). This three-hour workshop brought together researchers...
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