Background: The recent advent of powerful, exam-passing large language models (LLMs) in public awareness has led to concerns over students cheating, but has also given rise to calls for including or even focusing education on LLMs. There is a perceived urgency to react immediately, as well as claims that AI-based reforms of education will lead to…

This paper describes theory-led design as a way of developing novel tools for learning analytics (LA). It focuses upon the domain of automated discourse analysis (ADA) of group learning activities to help an instructor to orchestrate online groups in real-time. The paper outlines the literature on the development of LA tools within the domain of…

Research related to online discussions frequently faces the problem of analyzing huge corpora. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies may allow automating this analysis. However, the state-of-the-art in machine learning and text mining approaches yields models that do not transfer well between corpora related to different topics. Also,…