
Abelardo PardoUniversity of Adelaide
Abelardo Pardo
PhD in Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
About
259
Publications
122,792
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
10,545
Citations
Introduction
I am Professor and Head of School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences at The University of Adelaide. My research interest is software engineering techniques to improve learning experiences for learners and instructors. I have experience designing and deploying applications for learning analytics, social network analysis, computer supported collaboration, personalization, and feedback.
Additional affiliations
April 2020 - September 2023
March 2018 - April 2020
March 2015 - present
Society for Learning Analytics Research
Position
- Member of the Executive Committee
Education
September 1992 - August 1997
Publications
Publications (259)
Team cohesion is critical in driving successful outcomes for teams in collaborative learning settings. It shapes team behaviour, fostering shared perceptions, group synchrony and a common goal-oriented approach. This affinity becomes evident in dynamic interactions, offering insights into team behaviour through interaction data analysis. Interpreti...
Data is fundamental to Learning Analytics research and practice. However, the ethical use of data, particularly in terms of respecting learners’ privacy rights, is a potential barrier that could hinder the widespread adoption of Learning Analytics in the education industry. Despite the policies and guidelines of privacy protection being available w...
Preparatory learning tasks are considered critical for student success in flipped classroom courses. However, less isknown regarding which learning strategies students use and when they use those strategies in a flipped classroomcourse. In this study, we aimed to address this research gap. In particular, we investigated mutual connectionsbetween le...
Rapid technological advances, coupled with globalization, have resulted in a changing economy, requiring graduates and students to master not only technical and subject knowledge but also broad, transferable skills for workplace readiness. However, assessing these essential soft skills and competencies beyond the cognitive domain has often relied o...
Background
Maintaining cohesion is critical for teams to achieve shared goals and performance outcomes within a work‐integrated learning (WIL) environment. Cohesion is an emergent state that develops over time, representing the synchrony of different behavioural interactions. Cohesive teams will exhibit such phenomena by their temporal coordination...
The increasing use of technology in education has brought new opportunities for the systematic collection of student data. Analyzing technology-mediated trace data, for example, has enabled researchers to bring new insights into student learning processes and the factors involved to support learning and teaching. However, many of these learning ana...
Self-reflection and reflective writing have been pivotal for developing a deep understanding of concepts and fostering professional competency in learners. The confluence of the importance of reflective practices within the educational curriculum and the increased proliferation of technology have resulted in numerous studies of how to use automated...
Well-designed online courses enhance learning experiences and allow effective development of learners' skills and knowledge. A critical factor contributing to the design of online courses in the higher education settings are well-defined learning objectives that align with course assessments and learning activities. While there are several introspe...
For the developers of next‐generation education technology (EdTech), the use of Learning Analytics (LA) is a key competitive advantage as the use of some form of LA in EdTech is fast becoming ubiquitous. At its core LA involves the use of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics on the data generated by technology‐mediated learning to gain insights in...
The success and satisfaction of students with online courses are significantly impacted by the sequencing of learning objectives and activities. Equally critical is designing online degree programs and structuring multiple courses to reduce learners' cognitive load and attain maximum learning success. In its current form, the evaluation of program...
Student-facing visualisations have attracted increased attention with recent developments in data-driven tools to support individual and group work. Learning analytics dashboards (LADs), a data-enhanced feedback tool that allows students to make sense of their learning by providing insights into their learning behaviours represents one of the promi...
Technological affordances have shown promising potential in advancing the delivery of corporate learning programmes designed for professional leadership development. However, there is a considerable challenge in evaluating learners' skill acquisition, with most of the past research relying on pre‐ and post‐tests or other forms of self‐reports to me...
This study uses digital traces to help identify students’ online learning strategies by making a clear distinction between the descriptive features (the proportional distribution of students’ different online learning actions) and quantitative aspects (the total number of the online learning sessions), a distinction which has not been properly addr...
We present a systematic literature review of data-driven self-regulated learning (SRL) that emphasises the methodological importance of temporality and sequence, as opposed to conventional statistical analysis. Researchers seem unanimous in their view of the importance of SRL in modern online and blended educational settings; this is borne out by n...
Data privacy is a central theme in the global dialogue around the application of data science in education. Despite the growing need, research organisations and private companies working on education and learning analytics solutions still rely on ad hoc, red-tape-heavy and inconsistent approaches to privacy protection. This chapter outlines the sub...
The development of group cohesion for small groups in face-to-face educational learning settings has been widely studied for decades. The calibre of group cohesion within these contexts is typically associated with increases in performance, resulting in a productive collaboration that helps drive knowledge building and innovation within a learning...
One of the major factors affecting student learning is feedback. Although the importance of feedback has been recognized in educational institutions, dramatic changes - such as bigger class sizes and a more diverse student population - challenged the provision of effective feedback. In light of these changes, educators have increasingly been using...
Although technological advances have brought about new opportunities for scaling feedback to students, there remain challenges in how such feedback is presented and interpreted. There is a need to better understand how students make sense of such feedback to adapt self-regulated learning processes. This study examined students’ sense-making of lear...
Solving problems collaboratively depends on the abilities of individuals to integrate diverse skills and expertise into a dynamic, collaborative environment. However, learners often lack the interpersonal skills necessary to engage in collaboration. In that sense, socially-shared metacognitive regulation emerged recently as a framework for understa...
The recent focus on learning analytics (LA) to analyze temporal dimensions of learning holds the promise of providing insights into latent constructs, such as learning strategy, self-regulated learning (SRL), and metacognition. These methods seek to provide an enriched view of learner behaviors beyond the scope of commonly used correlational or cro...
The six papers in this special section focus on data capture and analysis to support learning engagement. The use of technology in education is an area that has undergone sustained rapid evolution over the last decade. Learning experiences are changing due to multiple factors, but technology mediation is related to substantial portions of that chan...
Generalizability of the value of methods based on learning analytics remains one of the big challenges in the field of learning analytics. One approach to testing generalizability of a method is to apply it consistently in different learning contexts. This study extends a previously published work by examining the generalizability of a learning ana...
Assessment and feedback, two important factors of any learning experience in higher education, are being significantly disrupted by the emergent ecosystem of increasingly technology-mediated learning environments. Digital learning experiences produce data sets with highly detailed accounts of the interactions among participants. This information br...
Research and development in learning analytics has established viable solutions for scaling personalised feedback to all students. However, questions remain regarding how such feedback is perceived, interpreted and acted upon by stakeholders. The present study reports on the analysis of focus group data from four courses to understand students’ sen...
This study examines the extent to which the learning orientations identified by student self‐reports and the observation of their online learning events were related to each other and to their academic performance. The participants were 322 first‐year engineering undergraduates, who were enrolled in a blended course. Using students' self‐report on...
The temporal and sequential nature of learning is receiving increasing focus in Learning Analytics circles. The desire to embed studies in recognised theories of self-regulated learning (SRL) has led researchers to conceptualise learning as a process that unfolds and changes over time. To that end, a body of research knowledge is growing which stat...
Feedback is a major factor of student success within higher education learning. However, recent changes-such as increased class sizes and socioeconomic diversity of the student population-challenged the provision of effective student feedback. Although the use of educational technology for personalised feedback to diverse students has gained tracti...
Feedback is a major factor of student success within higher education learning. However, recent changes-such as increased class sizes and socioeconomic diversity of the student population-challenged the provision of effective student feedback. Although the use of educational technology for personalised feedback to diverse students has gained tracti...
This paper aims to explore time management strategies followed by students in a flipped classroom through the analysis of trace data. Specifically, an exploratory study was conducted on the dataset collected in three consecutive offerings of an undergraduate computer engineering course ( N = 1,134). Trace data about activities were initially coded...
Research in learning analytics proposed different computational techniques to detect learning tactics and strategies adopted by learners in digital environments through the analysis of students’ trace data. While many promising insights have been produced, there has been much less understanding about how and to what extent different data analytic a...
This paper reports the findings of a study that proposed a novel learning analytic methodology that combines process mining with cluster analysis to study time management in the context of blended and online learning. The study was conducted with first-year students (N = 241) who were enrolled in blended learning of a health science course. The stu...
p>En este video, el Dr. Abelardo Pardo de la Universidad
de South Australia, describe cómo el uso de datos a partir de analíticas de aprendizaje permite aportar retroalimentación personalizada al estudiante. Con base en la información del contexto del estudiante, es posible
generar mensajes o sugerencias útiles para él.
Video disponible en https:...
Learning analytics (LA) has demonstrated great potential in improving teaching quality, learning experience and administrative efficiency. However, the adoption of LA in higher education is often beset by challenges in areas such as resources, stakeholder buy‐in, ethics and privacy. Addressing these challenges in a complex system requires agile lea...
Purpose
The analysis of data collected from user interactions with educational and information technology has attracted much attention as a promising approach to advancing our understanding of the learning process. This promise motivated the emergence of the field of learning analytics and supported the education sector in moving toward data-infor...
This paper presents a systematic literature review of learning analytics dashboards (LADs) research that reports empirical findings to assess the impact on learning and teaching. Several previous literature reviews identified self-regulated learning as a primary focus of LADs. However, there has been much less understanding how learning analytics a...
Recent developments in educational technologies have provided a viable solution to the challenges associated with scaling personalised feedback to students. However, there is currently little empirical evidence about the impact such scaled feedback has on student learning progress and study behaviour. This paper presents the findings of a study tha...
This project brought together learning analytics experts from across Australia to explore key ethical issues relating to the development and use of learning analytics in higher education. The result of these discussions was a discussion paper that provides an outline of seven ethical principles as well as practical considerations associated with th...
The use of learning trace data together with various analytical methods has proven successful in detecting patterns in learning behaviour, identifying student profiles, and clustering learning resources. However, interpretation of the findings is often difficult and uncertain due to a lack of contextual data (e.g., data on student motivation, emoti...
Learning analytics has the potential to detect and explain characteristics of learning strategies through analysis of trace data and communicate the findings via feedback. However, the role of learning analytics-based feedback in selection and regulation of learning strategies is still insufficiently explored and understood. This research aims to e...
Student engagement is an indicator that correlates with the overall quality of learning. Strategies such as the flipped-classroom approach aim to increase student engagement, but new learning designs require careful consideration in terms of how they are experienced by students and whether they mediate an enhanced learning experience. The study aim...
Flipped classroom (FC) is an active learning design requiring students to complete assigned pre-class learning activities in preparation for face-to-face sessions. Students’ timely, regular, and productive engagement with the pre-class activities is considered critical for the success of the overall FC design, as these activities serve to prepare s...
The learning analytics community has matured significantly over the past few years as a middle space where technology and pedagogy combine to support learning experiences. To continue to grow and connect these perspectives, research needs to move beyond the level of basic support actions. This means exploring the use of data to prove richer forms o...
Online learning and massive open online courses are widely used in engineering and technology education. Engineering next-generation learning requires overcoming the potential constraints of online learning environments which necessitate higher levels of self-regulation than traditional classroom settings. This particular requirement demands that l...
The recent focus on learning analytics to analyse temporal dimensions of learning holds a strong promise to provide insights into latent constructs such as learning strategy, self-regulated learning, and metacognition. There is, however, a limited amount of research in temporally-focused process mining in educational settings. Building on a growing...
The widespread adoption of digital e-learning environments and other learning technology has provided researchers with ready access to large quantities of data. Much of this data comes from discussion forums and has been studied with analytical methods drawn from social network analysis. However, within this large body of research there exists cons...
The success of the flipped classroom (FC) is effectively reliant on the level of student engagement with the preparatory activities prior to attending face-to-face teaching sessions. Information about the nature and level of student engagement with these activities can help instructors make informed decisions regarding how to best support student l...
The field of learning design studies how to support teachers in devising suitable activities for their students to learn. The field of learning analytics explores how data about students' interactions can be used to increase the understanding of learning experiences. Despite its clear synergy, there is only limited and fragmented work exploring the...
Collaboration is an increasingly important and difficult skill for graduate engineers to develop. While universities provide some measures of collaboration ability of students on graduation, there is still some dissatisfaction with the level of preparedness of students for collaborative activity in the workplace. This paper presents a case study of...
Research into self-regulated learning has traditionally relied upon self-reported data. While there is a rich body of literaturethat has extracted invaluable information from such sources, it suffers from a number of shortcomings. For instance, it has been shownthat surveys often provide insight into students’ perceptions about learning rather than...
This paper aims to identify self-regulation strategies from students' interactions with the learning management system (LMS). We used learning analytics techniques to identify metacognitive and cognitive strategies in the data. We define three research questions that guide our studies analyzing i) self-assessments of motivation and self regulation...
Despite strong interest in learning analytics (LA), adoption at a large-scale organizational level continues to be problematic. This may in part be due to the lack of acknowledgement of existing conceptual LA models to operationalize how key adoption dimensions interact to inform the realities of the implementation process. This paper proposes the...
First-year university students in an engineering course experienced activities which required them to engage in learning back and forth across physical and virtual learning space. The lecturer had designed a campus-based course with a significant online component involving activities for preparing the class, for use during class and for reflecting...
Students’ transition to tertiary education plays a critical role in their overall post-secondary experience. Even though educational institutions have designed and implemented various transition support programs, most of them still struggle to collect detailed information and provide tailored and timely support to students. With the high adoption r...
There is little debate regarding the importance of student feedback for improving the learning process. However, there remain significant workload barriers for instructors that impede their capacity to provide timely and meaningful feedback. The increasing role technology is playing in the education space may provide novel solutions to this impedim...
Online collaborative writing tools provide an efficient way to complete a writing task. However, existing tools only focus on technological affordances and ignore the importance of social affordances in a collaborative learning environment. This article describes a learning analytic system that analyzes writing behaviors, and creates visualizations...
Feedback has been identified as one of the factors with the largest potential for a positive impact in a learning experience. There is a significant body of knowledge studying feedback and providing guidelines for its implementation in learning environments. In parallel, the areas of learning analytics or educational data mining have emerged to exp...
The rapid growth of blended and online learning models in higher education has resulted in a parallel increase in the use of audiovisual resources among students and teachers. Despit e the heavy adoption of video resources, there have been few studies investigating their effect on learning processes and even less so in the context of academic devel...
The use of analytic methods for extracting learning strategies from trace data has attracted considerable attention in the literature. However, there is a paucity of research examining any association between learning strategies extracted from trace data and responses to well-established self-report instruments and performance scores. This paper fo...
Learning analytics research has often been touted as a means to address concerns regarding student retention outcomes. However, few research studies to date, have examined the impact of the implemented intervention strategies designed to address such retention challenges. Moreover, the methodological rigor of some of the existing studies has been c...
Student's learning happens where the learner is, rather than being constrained to a single physical or digital environment. It is of high relevance for the LAK community to provide analytics support in blended learning scenarios where students can interact at diverse learning spaces and with a variety of educational tools. This workshop aims to gat...