Dragan Gasevic

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Informatics

There is a growing interest in creating Learning Analytics (LA) systems that incorporate student perspectives. Yet, many LA systems still lean towards a technology-centric approach, potentially overlooking human values and the necessity of human oversight in automation. Although some recent LA studies have adopted a human-centred design stance, the...

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), exemplified by ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other state-of-the-art large language models and diffusion models, holds significant potential for transforming education and enhancing human productivity. While the prevalence of GenAI in education has motivated numerous research initiatives, integrating these tech...

Scaffolds that support self‐regulated learning (SRL) have been found to improve learning outcomes. The effects of scaffolds can differ depending on how learners use them and how specific scaffolds might influence learning processes differently. Personalized scaffolds have been proposed to be more beneficial for learning due to their adaptivity to l...

Recent years have witnessed a marked increase in both academic proposals and industrial adoptions of blockchain technology. However, a majority of the projects remain at the stage of prototype proposals and their real-world deployment has not met the anticipated level. This gap can be attributed to three major barriers - technical difficulties, hum...

Educational feedback is a crucial factor in the student’s learning journey, as through it, students are able to identify their areas of deficiencies and improve self-regulation. However, the literature shows that this is an area of great dissatisfaction, especially in higher education. Providing effective feedback becomes an increasingly challengin...

Self-regulation is an essential skill for lifelong learning. Research has shown that self-regulated learning (SRL) leads to greater academic achievement and sustainable education, but students often struggle with SRL. Scaffolds are widely reported as an effective and efficient support method for SRL. To further improve digital scaffolds’ effectiven...

Background: Outcome quality indicators (QIs) are often used to measure quality of care, particularly when disease-specific QIs are underdeveloped, an example being urological interventions. Without risk-adjustment, outcome QIs cannot be used for feedback and benchmarking. Administrative data captures multiplediseases and risk factors at a populatio...

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...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a critical skill for learners to acquire, and academics have designed and implemented SRL scaffolding to support learners in developing their SRL and use of learning strategies. Adaptive scaffolding is believed to be more effective in promoting SRL, but limited studies have explored how different learners perceive t...

Wearable positioning sensors are enabling unprecedented opportunities to model students’ procedural and social behaviours during collaborative learning tasks in physical learning spaces. Emerging work in this area has mainly focused on modelling group-level interactions from low-level x-y positioning data. Yet, little work has utilised such data to...

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) innovations make use of rapidly evolving sensing and artificial intelligence algorithms to collect rich data about learning activities that unfold in physical spaces. The analysis of these data is opening exciting new avenues for both studying and supporting learning. Yet, practical and logistical challenges com...

Socio-spatial learning analytics (SSLA) is an emerging area within learning analytics research that seeks to un-cover valuable educational insights from individuals’ social and spatial data traces. These traces are capturedautomatically through sensing technologies in physical learning spaces, and the research is commonly based onthe theoretical fo...

Learning strategies are important catalysts of students' learning. Research has shown that students with effective learning strategies are more likely to have better academic achievement. This study aimed to investigate students' adoption of learning strategies in different course implementations, the transfer of learning strategies between courses...

There has been a proliferation of learning analytics (LA) interfaces designed to support teachers, such as LA dashboards. However, although teacher dashboards have been extensively studied, there is limited understanding of the relationship between single-page or multi-page dashboard designs and the cognitive demands placed on teachers to use them....

Automatic code graders, also called Programming Online Judges (OJ), can support students and instructors in introduction to programming courses (CS1). Using OJs in CS1, instructors select problems to compose assignment lists, whereas students submit their code solutions and receive instantaneous feedback. Whilst this process reduces the instructors...

Peer feedback has been widely used in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) setting to improve students’ engagement with massive courses. Although the peer feedback process increases students’ self-regulatory practice, metacognition, and academic achievement, instructors need to go through large amounts of feedback text data which is muc...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the ability to regulate cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and emotional states while learning and is posited to be a strong predictor of academic success. It is therefore important to provide learners with effective instructions to promote more meaningful and effective SRL processes. One way to implement SRL i...

Educational technology innovations leveraging large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to automate the laborious process of generating and analysing textual content. While various innovations have been developed to automate a range of educational tasks (eg, question generation, feedback provision, and essay grading), there are concerns...

Human-AI collaborative writing has been greatly facilitated with the help of modern large language models (LLM), e.g., ChatGPT. While admitting the convenience brought by technology advancement, educators also have concerns that students might leverage LLM to partially complete their writing assignment and pass off the human-AI hybrid text as their...

We investigated the challenging task of generalizable automatic short answer scoring (ASAS), where a scoring model is tasked with generalizing to target domains (provided only with limited labeled data) that have no overlap with the auxiliary domains on which the model is trained. To address this, we introduced a framework based on Prototypical Neu...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often plagued by a low level of student engagement and retention, with many students dropping out before completing the course. In an effort to improve student retention, educational researchers are increasingly turning to the latest Machine Learning (ML) models to predict student learning outcomes, based on...

In embodied team learning activities, students are expected to learn to collaborate with others while freely moving in a physical learning space to complete a shared goal. Students can thus interact in various team configurations, resulting in increased complexity in their communication dynamics since unrelated dialogue segments can concurrently ha...

Dialogue acts (DAs) can represent conversational actions of tutors or students that take place during tutoring dialogues. Automating the identification of DAs in tutoring dialogues is significant to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Many prior studies employ machine learning models to classify DAs in tutoring dialogues and...

Dialogue Acts (DAs) can be used to explain what expert tutors do and what students know during the tutoring process. Most empirical studies adopt the random sampling method to obtain sentence samples for manual annotation of DAs, which are then used to train DA classifiers. However, these studies have paid little attention to sample informativeness...

Advancements in sensing technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) are making it possible to model learners’ affective and physiological states. Physiological synchrony and arousal have been increasingly used to unpack students’ affective and cognitive states (e.g., stress), which can ultimately affect their...

Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) is a widely-investigated task in education. Existing approaches often stressed the structure design of an ATS model and neglected the training process of the model. Considering the difficult nature of this task, we argued that the performance of an ATS model could be potentially boosted by carefully selecting data of va...

Smart Learning environments (SLEs) are defined [1] as learning ecologies where students engage in learning activities, or where teachers facilitate such activities with the support of tools and technology. SLEs can encompass physical or virtual spaces in which a system senses the learning context and process by collecting data, analyzes the data, a...

In embodied team learning activities, students are expected to learn to collaborate with others while freely moving in a physical learning space to complete a shared goal. Students can thus interact in various team configurations, resulting in increased complexity in their communication dynamics since unrelated dialogue segments can concurrently ha...

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive results in different writing tasks and have already attracted much attention from researchers and practitioners. However, there is limited research to investigate the capability of generative LLMs for reflective writing. To this end, in the present study, we have extensively reviewed th...

Learning analytics (LA) has gained increasing attention for its potential to improve different educational aspects (e.g., students’ performance and teaching practice). The existing literature identified some factors that are associated with the adoption of LA in higher education, such as stakeholder engagement and transparency in data use. The broa...

Researchers have demonstrated that dialogue‐based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can be effective in assisting students in learning. However, little research has attempted to explore the necessity of equipping dialogue‐based ITS with one of the most important capabilities of human tutors, that is, maintaining polite interactions with students,...

Educational feedback has been widely acknowledged as an effective approach to improving student learning. However, scaling effective practices can be laborious and costly, which motivated researchers to work on automated feedback systems (AFS). Inspired by the recent advancements in the pre-trained language models (e.g., ChatGPT), we posit that suc...

Dialogue acts (DAs) can represent conversational actions of tutors or students that take place during tutoring dialogues. Automating the identification of DAs in tutoring dialogues is significant to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Many prior studies employ machine learning models to classify DAs in tutoring dialogues and...

Dialogue Acts (DAs) can be used to explain what expert tutors do and what students know during the tutoring process. Most empirical studies adopt the random sampling method to obtain sentence samples for manual annotation of DAs, which are then used to train DA classifiers. However, these studies have paid little attention to sample informativeness...

Educational technology innovations leveraging large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to automate the laborious process of generating and analysing textual content. While various innovations have been developed to automate a range of educational tasks (e.g., question generation, feedback provision, and essay grading), there are concer...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in creating multimodal learning analytics (LA) systems that automatically analyse students’ states that are hard to see with the "naked eye", such as cognitive load and stress levels, but that can considerably shape their learning experience. A rich body of research has focused on detecting such as...

Background Learning Analytics (LA) is an emerging field concerned with measuring, collecting, and analysing data about learners and their contexts to gain insights into learning processes. As the technology of Learning Analytics is evolving, many systems are being implemented. In this context, it is essential to understand stakeholders' expectation...

Background Many learners struggle to productively self‐regulate their learning. To support the learners' self‐regulated learning (SRL) and boost their achievement, it is essential to understand the cognitive and metacognitive processes that underlie SRL. To measure these processes, contemporary SRL researchers have largely utilized think aloud or t...

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that students with effective learning strategies are more likely to have better academic achievement. Existing research has mostly focused on a single course or two, while longitudinal studies remain scarce. The present study examines the longitudinal sequence of students' strategies, their succession, consisten...

Although studied for decades by the research community, artificial intelligence (AI) in education has recently sparked much public debate with the wide-spread popularity of systems such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. Existing literature offers a wealth of research on design, deploying and evaluating AI-driven systems in education. However, the challenges r...

A foundational component of digital health involves collecting and leveraging electronic health data to improve health and wellbeing. One of the central technologies for collecting these data are electronic health records (EHRs). In this commentary, the authors explore intersection between digital health and data-driven reflective practice that is...

Embodied team learning is a form of group learning that occurs in co-located settings where students need to interact with others while actively using resources in the physical learning space to achieve a common goal. In such situations, communication dynamics can be complex as team discourse segments can happen in parallel at different locations o...

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a well-perfor...

Collocated teamwork remains a pervasive practice across all professional sectors. Even though live observations and video analysis have been utilized for understanding embodied interaction of team members, these approaches are impractical for scaling up the provision of feedback that can promote developing high-performance teamwork skills. Enrichin...

Feedback is an effective way to assist students in achieving learning goals. The conceptualisation of feedback is gradually moving from feedback as information to feedback as a learner-centred process. To demonstrate feedback effectiveness, feedback as a learner-centred process should be designed to provide quality feedback content and promote stud...

Feedback is an effective way to assist students in achieving learning goals. The conceptualisation of feedback is gradually moving from feedback as information to feedback as a learner-centred process. To demonstrate feedback effectiveness, feedback as a learner-centred process should be designed to provide quality feedback content and promote stud...

Background Assignments that involve writing based on several texts are challenging to many learners. Formative feedback supporting learners in these tasks should be informed by the characteristics of evolving written product and by the characteristics of learning processes learners enacted while developing the product. However, formative feedback i...

As a research field geared toward understanding and improving learning, Learning Analytics (LA) must be able to provide empirical support for causal claims. However, as a highly applied field, tightly controlled randomized experiments are not always feasible nor desirable. Instead, researchers often rely on observational data, based on which they m...

The application of blockchain technology in education has gained increased attention from researchers and practitioners in the past few years. However, most pilots are stuck in the prototype stage and meet industrial adoption barriers. In this study, targeting the identified hindering factors, we develop an education credentials management and veri...

Context In health care, monitoring of quality indicators (QIs) in general urology remains underdeveloped in comparison to other clinical specialties. Objective To identify, synthesise, and appraise QIs that monitor in-hospital care for urology patients. Evidence acquisition This systematic review included peer-reviewed articles identified via Emb...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic? Online learning has grown significantly during the last decade. This growth increases the need for online assessment methods that can provide a valid, reliable, and fair measure of student knowledge. Research demonstrated the prevalence of academic dishonesty in online learning. There is a ti...

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is related to increased learning performance. Scaffolding learners in their SRL activities in a computer-based learning environment can help to improve learning outcomes, because students do not always regulate their learning spontaneously. Based on theoretical assumptions, scaffolds should be continuously adaptive and...

Potential benefits of learning analytics (LA) for improving students’ performance, predicting students’ success, and enhancing teaching and learning practice have increasingly been recognized in higher education. However, the adoption of LA in higher education institutions (HEIs) to date remains sporadic and predominantly small in scale due to seve...

Background: Stringent public health measures have been shown to influence the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 within school environments. We investigated the potential transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a primary school setting with and without public health measures, using fine-grained physical positioning traces captured before the COVID-19 pandemic. Met...

Providing electronic health data to medical practitioners to reflect on their performance can lead to improved clinical performance and quality of care. Understanding the sensemaking process that is enacted when practitioners are presented with such data is vital to ensure an improvement in performance. Thus, the primary objective of this research...

Assessments are crucial to measuring student progress and providing constructive feedback. However, the instructors have a huge workload, which leads to the application of more superficial assessments that, sometimes, does not include the necessary questions and activities to evaluate the students adequately. For instance, it is well-known that ope...

The COVID-19 pandemic substantively impacted educational processes and posed urgent questions regarding how teachers can adapt their practices to create supportive learning communities in online environments. The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers provided dialogic feedback using technologies to create learning communities despite...