News

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...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

The concluding issue of the 50th Anniversary volume of the British Journal of Educational Technology has just been published, co-edited by CIC’s Director, Simon Buckingham Shum, along with Prof. Rose Luckin from UCL Knowledge Lab (read their Editorial overview). Kirsty Kitto and Simon Knight also contributed an article, focusing on the ethics of learning analytics systems. 11 contributions from leading research teams in Learning Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence in Education (LA/AIED), pro...
Read More

When a woman is leading the country, do they pass more pro-women laws? Can we say that one country has a better law for women than another, when it comes to domestic violence, tax or some other piece of legislation? Until now, there was no way to answer such questions in a rigorous way. But Ramona Vijeyarasa (UTS Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law) found that CIC could help, and working with CIC Data Scientist Mike Pracy, has invented a new way to assess legislative...
Read More

UTS has a strong commitment to ensuring that academic English is at an acceptable standard for all students across all disciplines. In addition, a number of standards are required by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). These factors led to the establishment of an English Language Working Group (ELWG) to embed the raising of English language ability across the Institution. These factors led to the establishment of an English Language Working Group (ELWG), chaired by the P...
Read More