The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on a MOOC in Aerospace Structures and Materials

In March 2020 COVID-19 brought the world and with that aviation to a standstill. Also in March 2020, the third run of the DelftX MOOC Introduction to Aerospace<br/>Structures and Materials started on edX. This MOOC generally attracts a mixture of young aviation enthusiasts (often students) and aviation professionals. Given the large interest...

A four-country cross-case analysis of academic staff expectations about learning analytics in higher education

The purpose of this paper is to explore the expectations of academic staff to learning analytics services from an ideal as well as a realistic perspective. This mixed-method study focused on a cross-case analysis of staff from Higher Education Institutions from four European universities (Spain, Estonia, Netherlands, UK). While there are some...

From students with love: An empirical study on learner goals, self-regulated learning and sense-making of learning analytics in higher education

Unequal stakeholder engagement is a common pitfall of adoption approaches of learning analytics in higher education leading to lower buy-in and flawed tools that fail to meet the needs of their target groups. With each design decision, we make assumptions on how learners will make sense of the visualisations, but we know very little about how...

Open Learner Models and Learning Analytics Dashboards: A Systematic Review

This paper aims to link student facing Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) to the corpus of research on Open Learner Models (OLMs), as both have similar goals. We conducted a systematic review of literature on OLMs and compared the results with a previously conducted review of LADs for learners in terms of (i) data use and modelling, (ii)...

Follow the successful crowd: Raising MOOC completion rates through social comparison at scale

Social comparison theory asserts that we establish our social and personal worth by comparing ourselves to others. In in-person learning environments, social comparison offers students critical feedback on how to behave and be successful. By contrast, online learning environments afford fewer social cues to facilitate social comparison. Can...

The Learning Tracker: A Learner Dashboard that Encourages Self-regulation in MOOC Learners

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to make quality education affordable and available to the masses and reduce the gap between the most privileged and the most disadvantaged learners worldwide. However, this potential is overshadowed by low completion rates, often below 15%. Due to the high level of autonomy that is required...