In September we appointed three PhD students who have become an integral part of the team, working alongside our staff to make an impact in the university and tackle data-driven problems. All their work have a strong transdisciplinary flavour, investigating the interplay between algorithms, ethics, user experience, participatory design and educational theory and practice.
Read below to find about their work.
Antonette Shibani
Shibani is a PhD student in Learning Analytics at the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC), UTS. Her research is on ‘Writing Analytics’ which makes use of analytics techniques to improve student writing. Automated feedback generated by text analysis and visualisation techniques provides immediate feedback on student writing and helps them revise their drafts in early stages.
Shibani is particularly interested in finding the effective forms of such formative feedback on writing at scale to support self-regulated learning in students. She also aims to integrate peer feedback on top of the automated feedback to bridge the human context gap in automated feedback. This enables peer learning where students simultaneously learn and contribute to other students’ learning. She blogs at http://antonetteshibani.com/.
Carlos Gerardo Prieto Alvarez
Carlos is a PhD student at the Connected Intelligence Centre. His research is focused on investigating the most effective ways to improve the adoption of learning analytic tools by students. To achieve this, Carlos is exploring the use of user-centred design and participatory methods with students in order to develop an adoption framework that can facilitate the adoption of new learning analytics innovations. He is particularly interested in bridging Human Computer Interaction and Learning Analytics to include students into the design process loop and support them in developing graduate attributes. His adoption framework will support researchers and developers to deploy learning analytics tools which will be better aligned to the student’s needs and goals. He blogs at medium.com/@masterprieto. He is an active member of the User Experience Professional Association (UXPA).
Vanessa Echeverria
Vanessa Echeverria is a PhD student in Learning Analytics at the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC), UTS. Her main research is about ‘Learning Analytics for Collaborative Learning’, attempting to understand the behaviour of participants in co-located spaces to enhance and support collaborative skills. The aim of her research sought to solve three particular issues:
(1) gathering data from co-located environments to extract high-level features from multimodal data; (2) applying data mining techniques from high-level features to understand participants’ behaviour and; (3) providing correct feedback to support self-regulation and group awareness. In addition, her purpose is to provide a contribution on framing the collaborative learning feedback in co-located spaces.