The tremendous growth of educational institutions' electronic data provides the opportunity to extract information that can be used to predict students' overall success, predict students' dropout rate, evaluate the performance of teachers and instructors, improve the learning material according to students' needs, and much more. This paper aims to…

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), learners can interact with each other using discussion boards. Automatically inferring the states or needs of learners from their posts is of interest to instructors, who are faced with a high attrition in MOOCs. Machine learning has previously been successfully used to identify states such as confusion or…

Educational games help reinforce educational concepts. They help students learn through hypothesizing, probing, and reflecting upon the game environment. Understanding the impact of a game is important before deploying it in a class. Recent studies in learning analysis describe methodologies and approaches for analyzing educational games. However,…

A bottleneck in gathering big data about learning is instrumentation designed to record data about processes students use to learn and information on which those processes operate. The software system nStudy fills this gap. nStudy is an extension to the Chrome web browser plus a server side database for logged trace data plus peripheral modules…

The increasing prevalence of learner-centred forms of learning as well as an increase in the number of learners actively participating on a wide range of digital platforms and devices give rise to an ever-increasing stream of learning data. Learning analytics (LA) can enable learners, teachers, and their institutions to better understand and…

Ask Dr. Discovery is an NSF-funded study addressing the need for ongoing, large-scale museum evaluation while investigating new ways to encourage museum visitors to engage deeply with museum content. To realize these aims, we are developing and implementing a mobile app with two parts: (1) a front-end virtual scientist called Dr. Discovery (Dr. D)…

This paper presents a new mobile software tool, PhotoMAT (Photo Management and Analysis Tool), and students' experiences with this tool within a scaffolded curricular unit--Neighborhood Safari. PhotoMAT was designed to support learners' investigations of backyard animal behavior and works with image sets obtained using fixed-position field cameras…