Christothea Herodotou

• PhD, SFHEA, MSc, BA (Hons)
• Professor of learning technologies and social justice at The Open University

This chapter discusses the process of adapting inquiry learning environments (LEs) from one national context to another, drawing from the collaboration of eight partners from Europe and Israel, all participating in the European project “Digital Support for Inquiry, Collaboration, and Reflection on Socio-scientific debates” (CoReflect, http://www.co...

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is a rapidly evolving area of scientific innovation and an issue receiving global attention. Attempts to devise usable instruments that assess people's attitudes towards this innovation have been rare and non-systematic. The aim of this paper is to present the development and validation of the genetically modif...

Game appropriation is currently not well conceptualized. What literature does exists uses the term primarily to denote gamers' practices beyond the designers' original intentions, for instance, game content modifications. This article frames game appropriation in a different manner; unlike existing appropriation models, game appropriation is concep...

This paper examines the role of trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) in gamers’ preferences for play and frequency of gaming in a sample of 1051 young adult US/European gamers, who play frequently the online massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft (WoW). Trait EI was shown to predict social and achievement preferences for play as well as f...

This paper presents insights from five case studies with 173 students aged 11–14 years old across three countries in Europe, exploring the integration of design thinking (DT) and emerging digital technologies in K-12 education. The study aimed to understand the impact of DT and digital technologies on the development of students’ 21st-century skill...

The wide availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for content production has resulted in a growing interest in the area of education, particularly for course content production purposes. This research has mapped out a set of curriculum production tasks and illustrated how generative AI can support three important tasks: the developme...

The rapid evolution of Generative AI (Gen AI) and its integration into higher education necessitates a critical evaluation of teaching and learning practices. Many students already use publicly available AI digital assistants (p-AIDA) like ChatGPT for academic purposes. However, there are concerns around the use of such p-AIDA tools, in particular...

Generative AI is widely available and has raised the expectation that it will impact Education. Models, such as ChatGPT, can quickly produce plausible texts on a wide range of topics, and this capability may be of potential use in course content production. This paper selects several important course content production tasks, describes the prompts...

The aim of this narrative review is to understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT) is thought to be used to support teachers in content authoring and curriculum production. Our findings indicate that Generative AI is envisioned as a co-design partner in enhancing educational content such as rubrics, lesson...

In this report, we present the collaborative efforts between the Open University (OU) in the UK and Hellenic Open University (HOU) in Greece, aimed at designing a predictive learning analytics dashboard with recommendation services for online and distance students. This initiative seeks to offer students personalized feedback throughout their acade...

This twelfth report proposes ten innovations which have the potential to exert a greater influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University (UK) collaborated with researchers and practitioners from the LIVE Initiative at Vanderbilt University in the US. A wide range...

Educational outcomes from traditionally underrepresented groups are generally worse than for their more advantaged peers. This problem is typically known as the awarding gap (we use the term awarding gap over ‘attainment gap’ as attainment places the responsibility on students to attain at equal levels) and continues to pose a challenge for educati...

Innovating Pedagogy 2024 Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (mass participation citizen science and learning to be a scientist through scientific inquiry, (Herodotou et al, 2017), and a concern to involve participation by the members of a community for community purposes. We describe the work we have done on this...

The use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and 3D printing are amongst the EU targeted actions for supporting the digital transformation of education. Yet, despite these technologies being accessible to education stakeholders, there is a lack of concrete pedagogy and teachers’ professional development for t...

Awarding gaps have been commonly observed between different socio-demographic categories of students, especially in the domains of sociology and learning science. Recent research has shown that using Learning Analytics models could be exploited to reduce these gaps, and therefore contribute to making the learning process more inclusive and equitabl...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This eleventh report proposes another ten innovations. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University, UK, collaborated...

Educational applications (apps) are ubiquitous within children's learning environments and emerging evidence has demonstrated their efficacy. However, it remains unclear what the active ingredients (ie, mechanisms), or combination of ingredients, of successful maths apps are. The current study developed a new, open‐access, three‐step framework for...

Participation in authentic research in the field and online through community and Citizen Science (CCS) has been shown to bring learning benefits to volunteers. In online CCS, available platforms present distinct features, ranging from scaffolding the data collection process to supporting data analysis and enabling volunteers to initiate their own...

Education 4.0 is a recently introduced concept focused on innovation, novelty, use of technology and connections with employment and industry. In particular, in engineering disciplines like computer science (CS) it is essential that educators keep up to date with industry developments. Indeed, how CS educators effectively design and implement innov...

The progressive move of higher education institutions (HEIs) towards blended and online environments, accelerated by COVID-19, and their access to a greater variety of student data has heightened the need for ethical learning analytics (LA). This need is particularly salient in light of a lack of comprehensive, evidence-based guidelines on ethics t...

Existing Predictive Learning Analytics (PLA) systems utilising machine learning models show they can improve teacher practice and, at the same time, student outcomes. The accuracy, and related errors, of these systems can negatively influence their adoption. However, little effort has been made to investigate the errors made by the underlying model...

This paper examines the pedagogical integration of Virtual Microscopes (VMs) in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), to identify best practice and improve online pedagogy. It has captured the perspectives of 12 Health and Earth Science university teachers, through in-depth interviews, about the current integration of the VM in online teaching, ben...

This is the tenth report in a series of reports exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment. It proposes ten promising innovations for a post-pandemic world of education: hybrid models, dual learning scenarios, pedagogies of microcredentials, pedagogy of autonomy, watch parties, influencer-led education, pedagogies of the home, pedagog...

Educational maths applications (apps) are an emerging trend in children’s learning environments aiming to raise their mathematical attainment. However, with over 200,000 educational apps available within the App Store (Apple, 2014), deciding which apps to use poses a significant challenge to teachers, parents, and policy makers. The current study a...

This chapter reflects on two major learning analytics initiatives which took place at the Open University (OU) in recent years and which facilitated the adoption of analytics across the university. Analytics for Action (A4A) focused on the use of learning analytics to inform the learning design of online courses and Early Alert Indicators (EAI) exa...

To study and understand the importance of Internet of Things-driven citizen science (IoT-CS) combined with data satisficing, we set up and undertook a citizen science experiment for air quality (AQ) in four Pakistan cities using twenty-one volunteers. We used quantitative methods to analyse the AQ data. Three research questions (RQ) were posed as f...

The choice of mobile applications (apps) for learning has been heavily relied on customer and teacher reviews, designers’ descriptions, and alignment with existing learning and human-computer interaction theories. There is limited empirical evidence to advise on the educational value of mobile apps as these are used by children. Understanding the i...

Community and citizen science in online settings could be seen as a means for young people to engage with and contribute to authentic science. Yet, there is a limited understanding of who takes part in citizen science among young people, what they learn, and through which processes, particularly in online settings. In this exploratory study, we ana...

This study addresses an existing gap in our understanding of how participation in environmental Community and Citizen Science (CCS) projects may impact young volunteers' environmental science learning across a wide variety of settings. We examined youth learning across four settings which we represented as cases: 5 short-term field-based events (Bi...

The power of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in supporting teachers in the iterative process of improving the effectiveness of their courses supporting students is widely acknowledged. However, the use of LA dashboards by teachers remains variable. In this chapter, we explore teachers’ perspectives on the promises, needs and challenges of using...

Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) can provide learners with insights about their study progress through visualisations of the learner and learning data. Despite their potential usefulness to support learning, very few studies on LADs have considered learners’ needs and have engaged learners in the process of design and evaluation. Aligning with...

Online community and citizen science (CCS) projects have broadened access to scientific research and enabled different forms of participation in biodiversity research; however, little is known about whether and how such opportunities are taken up by young people (aged 5–19). Furthermore, when they do participate, there is little research on whether...

Predictive learning analytics (PLA) is an educational innovation that has the potential to enhance the teaching practice and facilitate students' learning and success. Yet, the degree of adoption of PLA across educational institutions remains limited, while teachers who make use of PLA do not engage with it in a systematic manner. Informed by the U...

In this work, we investigate the degree-awarding gap in distance higher education by studying the impact of a Predictive Learning Analytics system, when applying it to 3 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses with over 1,500 students. We focus on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity (BAME) students and students from areas wi...

Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages of the scientific research, mostly data collection and processing. They are less likely to have an explicit objective to support and promote volunteers' learning. In response to that, “citizen inquiry” emphases citizens' learning and community education,...

Online citizen science projects have broadened options for accessing science and enabled different forms of participation in scientific research for adult and young volunteers. Yet, little is known regarding participation patterns among youth participants. Quantitative approaches were used to investigate the contribution of 183 young volunteers to...

Growing numbers of Citizen Science (CS) projects focus on learning about science through the collaboration of professional scientists and citizen scientists. However, resources for the design and evaluation of CS projects in terms of learning about science are scarce. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a model for the heuristic analysis of the...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This ninth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a widespread influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Ins...

This article aims to provide an account of the use of reflexive photography in capturing player creativity in practice and present a guide to how game design can support player creativity. While previous literature has examined some aspects of player creativity in digital games, there remains a dearth of work, which examines how design elements of...

Despite the potential of Predictive Learning Analytics (PLAs) to identify students at risk of failing their studies, research demonstrating effective application of PLAs to higher education is relatively limited. The aims of this study are 1) to identify whether and how PLAs can inform the design of motivational interventions and 2) to capture the...

YouTube has become a popular digital media platform used by young children. However, concerns have been raised around inappropriate video content and limited quality. A lack of research and theoretical discussion exists on how best to evaluate the quality of YouTube videos made for children. In this study, we reviewed research and developed a set o...

This review aims to provide a concise overview of four distinct research fields: Artificial Intelligence and EDucation (AIED), Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Educational Data Mining (EDM), and Learning Analytics (LA). While all four fields are focused on understanding learning and teaching using technology, each field has a relat...

YouTube has risen in popularity to become a global phenomenon. Children use YouTube for entertainment and educational purposes. Some benefits of YouTube have been reported such as helping children learn and develop skills and knowledge about their world. However, concerns have been raised about children’s exposure to inappropriate and disturbing Yo...

Despite recognising the importance of transparency and understanding of predictive models, little effort has been made to investigate the errors made by these models. In this paper, we address this gap by interviewing 12 students whose results and predictions of submitting their assignment differed. Following our previous quantitative analysis of 2...

Participation in online citizen science is increasingly popular, yet studies that examine the impact on participants’ learning are limited. The aims of this paper are to identify the learning impact on volunteers who participate in online citizen science projects and to explore the methods used to study the impact. The ten empirical studies, examin...

A vast number of studies reported exciting innovations and practices in the field of Learning Analytics (LA). Whilst they provided substantial insights, most of these studies have been implemented in single-course or small-scale settings. There are only a few studies that are large-scale and institutional-wide adaptations of LA and have explored th...

Citizen Science (CS) is an increasingly popular activity enacted either in the field or online. Volunteers participate in research activities such as data processing and analysis by, for example, identifying plants and animals. In this paper we examine young people’s participation in online CS projects hosted on the Zooniverse platform. This is an...

Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

The implementation of learning analytics may empower distance learning institutions to provide real-time feedback to students and teachers. Given the leading role of the Open University UK (OU) in research and application of learning analytics, this study aims to share the lessons learned from the experiences of 42 participants from a range of facu...

Currently little is known about how creativity is expressed in digital entertainment games or what specific design elements may foster it. Using a qualitative methodology, this article reports on the findings of 24 semi-structured interviews and 14 narrative surveys with regular players of different types of digital games. Using a hybrid thematic a...

Creativity has been widely studied across various disciplines such as psychology and education from a variety of perspectives and has been argued to provide a range of different benefits such as the development of transferrable skills. However, not much is known about how creativity is conceptualized within digital entertainment games from the pers...

There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability. What is negotiable is how best to achieve the deve...

This study presents an advanced predictive learning analytics system, OU Analyse (OUA), and evidence from its evaluation with online teachers at a distance learning university. OUA is a predictive system that uses machine learning methods for the early identification of students at risk of not submitting (or failing) their next assignment. Teachers...

By collecting longitudinal learner and learning data from a range of resources, predictive learning analytics (PLA) are used to identify learners who may not complete a course, typically described as being at risk. Mixed effects are observed as to how teachers perceive, use, and interpret PLA data, necessitating further research in this direction....

This paper addresses the related issues of which pedagogies improve with scale and how to develop a novel platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper begins by introducing pedagogy-informed design of platforms for learning at scale. It then summarizes previous work to develop a platform for open science investigations. Then, it introduces...

Predictive Learning Analytics (PLA) aim to improve learning by identifying students at risk of failing their studies. Yet, little is known about how best to integrate and scaffold PLA initiatives into higher education institutions. Towards this end, it becomes essential to capture and analyze the perceptions of relevant educational stakeholders (i....

New forms of data, data visualisation and human interaction with data are changing radically and rapidly. As a result, what it means to be data literate is also changing. In the big data era, people should not simply be passive recipients of data-based reports. They need to become active data explorers who can plan for, acquire, manage, analyse, an...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This seventh report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the I...

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about thedesign of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterativepedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based andmobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. Thedesign involved an exp...

p class="3">The importance of teachers in online learning is widely acknowledged to effectively support and stimulate learners. With the increasing availability of learning analytics data, online teachers might be able to use learning analytics dashboards to facilitate learners with different learning needs. However, deployment of learning analytic...

Citizen inquiry describes the learning benefits to people who engage actively in inquiry-led investigations. The Tomorrow’s world nQuire project, a collaboration between The Open University and the BBC in the UK, utilises the citizen inquiry paradigm to design an online platform to support large-scale public experiments, linked to TV or radio progr...

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are becoming commonplace in Higher Education. Amongst the latest VLE developments is the design and use of Virtual Microscopes (VMs) that allow for viewing and manipulation of online images by multiple students. Although students are found to be generally satisfied with the use of VMs, it is yet not known what t...

The vision of the Citizen Inquiry group is to educate citizens in scientific thinking and empower them in initiating or joining citizen science projects across disciplines both social and natural sciences. Citizen inquiry researchers have designed and evaluated a set of web-based and mobile tools to scaffold learning, participation, and communicati...

The increasing growth and usage of mobile devices, such as tablets and iPads, by young children has not yet been accompanied by systematic research about the effects they have on children's learning and the conditions that facilitate or hinder learning and engagement. As a result, only few empirically-based guidelines exist to guide parents, educat...

Citizen science and crowd sourcing are often used interchangeably to denote the participation of the general public in social activities or projects. The "crowd" becomes a source of information when it contributes ideas, content, or services to solve a problem, generate content, raise funds, and vote best solutions. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia....

Mobile applications are popular among young children, yet there is a dearth of studies examining their impact on learning and development. A systematic review identified 19 studies reporting learning effects on children 2 to 5 years old. The number of children participating in experimental, quasi-experimental, or mixed-method studies was 862 and in...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of...

Citizen Inquiry: Synthesising Science and Inquiry Learning is the first book of its kind to bring together the concepts of citizen science and inquiry-based learning to illustrate the pedagogical advantages of this approach. It shifts the emphasis of scientific investigations from scientists to the general public, by educating learners of all ages...

Randomised control trials (RCTs) are an evidence-based research approach which has not yet been adopted and widely used in open and distance education to inform educational policy and practice. Despite the challenges entailed in their application, RCTs hold the power to robustly evaluate the effects of educational interventions in distance learning...

The authors describe the design and formative evaluation of a sensor toolkit for Android smartphones and tablets that supports inquiry-based science learning. The Sense-it app enables a user to access all the motion, environmental and position sensors available on a device, linking these to a website for shared crowd-sourced investigations. The aut...

In this paper, we describe a large-scale study about the use of predictive learning analytics data with 240 teachers in 10 modules at a distance learning higher education institution. The aim of the study was to illuminate teachers' uses and practices of predictive data, in particular identify how predictive data was used to support students at ris...

A popular activity among young children is the use of mobile devices and apps. Yet, the impact of mobile devices on learning and development is rather underexplored. The limited studies identified explore effects on literacy development and communication and report on mixed findings. A considerable gap is observed as to how the use of mobile apps r...

Personalisation of learning is a recurring trend in our society, referred to in government speeches, popular media, conference and research papers and technological innovations. This latter aspect—of using personalisation in technology‐enhanced learning (TEL)—has promised much but has not always lived up to the claims made. Personalisation is often...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fifth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of...

This paper reports on the case study of 18 pre-schoolers 5 years old and their use of the mobile game Angry Birds. The game was played repeatedly for seven days with the aim to capture its impact on science learning and understanding. Data were collected through pre/posttests, screen recordings, questionnaires, and interviews. Findings indicate a b...