Let Me Hack It: Teachers’ Perceptions About ‘Making’ in Education

Making in education is an emergent practice focusing on learners as creators of things in a collaborative fashion while promoting knowledge construction through technology, design, and creative self-expression. Teachers’ (n=33) opinions about making were studied using an online questionnaire after they had attended an online course for professional development about making in education. The results suggest that there exists a group of educators who consider making as a promising approach in education and want to promote its use in schools. peerReviewed

“Sitting at the Stern and Holding the Rudder” : Teachers’ Reflections on Action in Higher Education Based on Student Agency Analytics

Digital technologies in teaching and learning in higher education have the potential to enhance student agency. Student agency is an essential resource to nurture, especially at times when students face challenges emerging from the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. In addition, contemporary policymaking has identified the importance of student agency. Student agency analytics is a process utilizing learning analytics, specifically psychometrics and machine learning to provide teachers insights about the agentic resources of their students. Four teachers in higher education were provided with student agency analytics results of their mathematics courses. The teachers partici…

Understanding the Study Experiences of Students in Low Agency Profile: Towards a Smart Education Approach

In this paper, we use student agency analytics to examine how university students who assessed to have low agency resources describe their study experiences. Students ( n=292 ) completed the Agency of University Students (AUS) questionnaire. Furthermore, they reported what kinds of restrictions they experienced during the university course they attended. Four different agency profiles were identified using robust clustering. We then conducted a thematic analysis of the open-ended answers of students who assessed to have low agency resources. Issues relating to competence beliefs, self-efficacy, student-teacher relations, time as a resource, student well-being, and course contents seemed to …

Student agency analytics: learning analytics as a tool for analysing student agency in higher education

This paper presents a novel approach and a method of learning analytics to study student agency in higher education. Agency is a concept that holistically depicts important constituents of intentional, purposeful, and meaningful learning. Within workplace learning research, agency is seen at the core of expertise. However, in the higher education field, agency is an empirically less studied phenomenon with also lacking coherent conceptual base. Furthermore, tools for students and teachers need to be developed to support learners in their agency construction. We study student agency as a multidimensional phenomenon centring on student-experienced resources of their agency. We call the analyt…

Course Satisfaction in Engineering Education Through the Lens of Student Agency Analytics

This Research Full Paper presents an examination of the relationships between course satisfaction and student agency resources in engineering education. Satisfaction experienced in learning is known to benefit the students in many ways. However, the varying significance of the different factors of course satisfaction is not entirely clear. We used a validated questionnaire instrument, exploratory statistics, and supervised machine learning to examine how the different factors of student agency affect course satisfaction among engineering students (N = 293). Teacher’s support and trust for the teacher were identified as both important and critical factors concerning experienced course satisf…

The Finnish Version of the Affinity for Technology Interaction (ATI) Scale : Psychometric Properties and an Examination of Gender Differences

The pervasiveness of technical systems in our lives calls for a broad understanding of the interaction between humans and technology. Affinity for technology interaction (ATI) scale measures the tendency of a person to actively engage or to avoid interaction with technological systems, including both software and physical devices. This research presents a psychometric analysis of a Finnish version of the ATI scale. The data consisted of 796 responses of students in a Finnish university. The data were analyzed utilizing factor analysis and both nonparametric and parametric item response theory. The Finnish version of the ATI scale proved to be essentially unidimensional, showing high reliabi…

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Explainable Student Agency Analytics

Several studies have shown that complex nonlinear learning analytics (LA) techniques outperform the traditional ones. However, the actual integration of these techniques in automatic LA systems remains rare because they are generally presumed to be opaque. At the same time, the current reviews on LA in higher education point out that LA should be more grounded to the learning science with actual linkage to teachers and pedagogical planning. In this study, we aim to address these two challenges. First, we discuss different techniques that open up the decision-making process of complex techniques and how they can be integrated in LA tools. More precisely, we present various global and local e…

Framework for pedagogical learning analytics

Learning analytics is an emergent technological practice and a multidisciplinary scientific discipline, which goal is to facilitate effective learning and knowledge of learning. In this design science research, I combine knowledge discovery process, a concept of pedagogical knowledge, ethics of learning analytics and microservice architecture. The result is a framework for pedagogical learning analytics. The framework is applied and evaluated in the context of agency analytics. The framework contributes to the practical use of learning analytics.

Capturing cognitive load management during authentic virtual reality flight training with behavioural and physiological indicators

Background Cognitive load (CL) management is essential in safety-critical fields so that professionals can monitor and control their cognitive resources efficiently to perform and solve scenarios in a timely and safe manner, even in complex and unexpected circumstances. Thus, cognitive load theory (CLT) can be used to design virtual reality (VR) training programmes for professional learning in these fields. Objectives We studied CL management performance through behavioural indicators in authentic VR flight training and explored if and to what extent physiological data was associated with CL management performance. Methods The expert (n = 8) and novice pilots (n = 6) performed three approac…