Xavier Ochoa

New York University | NYU · Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

This chapter provides an introduction and an overview of this edited book on Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA). The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to the field of MMLA and provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary MMLA research. The contributions come from diverse contexts to support different objectives and stakeholders (e....

This paper proposes an overarching framework for automated collaboration feedback that bridges theory and tool as well as technology and pedagogy. This pragmatic and theory-driven framework guides our thinking by outlining the components involved in converting theoretical collaboration constructs into features that can be automatically extracted an...

With the myriad theories generated through research over the years, a continuing challenge for researchers is to navigate the multitude of theories in order to communicate their research, integrate empirical results, and make progress as a field by building upon empirical research. The Social Unit of Learning project was purposefully designed so th...

The ongoing changes and challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated long-standing inequities in education, leading many to question basic assumptions about how learning can best benefit all students. Thirst for data about learning is at an all-time high, sometimes without commensurate attention to ensuring principles this commun...

This work describes the design and implementation of a functional assistant system to support instructors to design or redesign the curriculum of their courses. The system uses automatically generated ontologies from textbooks that reflect the structure of a specific body of knowledge. Twelve instructors participated in the generation of curricula...

This paper provides an overarching framework representing the relationships between theory and tool, technology and pedagogy, and contextual dependence and independence. An extension of this framework guides our thinking by outlining the components involved when attempting to "close the loop" between theoretical knowledge and tools in practice. A p...

Es sabido que América Latina es la región más desigual del planeta. Para hacer frente a la realidad, una de las cuestiones clave es impulsar la colaboración en la región, que permitan que la innovación y el conocimiento sean instrumentos fundamentales para erradicar la pobreza, combatir el hambre y mejorar la salud, así como para alcanzar un desarr...

Multimodal learning analytics, which is collection, analysis, and report of diverse learning traces to better understand and improve the learning process, has been producing a series of interesting prototypes to analyze learning activities that were previously hard to objectively evaluate. However, none of these prototypes have been taken out of th...

Workshop proposal for CrossMMLA focused on collecting and analysing multimodal data across the physical and the virtual. Under the current global pandemic, cross physical and virtual spaces play a substantial factor and challenge for MMLA, which is focused on collaborative learning in physical spaces. The workshop proposes an asynchronous format th...

Workshop proposal for CrossMMLA focused on collecting and analysing multimodal data across the physical and the virtual. Under the current global pandemic, cross physical and virtual spaces play a substantial factor and challenge for MMLA, which is focused on collaborative learning in physical spaces. The workshop proposes an asynchronous format th...

Providing feedback for collaboration activities is divided between theoretical studies of individual constructs and empirical tools that provide feedback. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework that strives to bridge this divide by providing a set of both comprehensive and comprehensible constructs that can be estimated through multimodal learni...

Our 2019 editorial opened a dialogue about what is needed to foster an impactful field of learning analytics (Knight, Wise, & Ochoa, 2019). As we head toward the close of a tumultuous year that has raised profound questions about the structure and processes of formal education and its role in society, this conversation is more relevant than ever. T...

This paper is in response to the manuscript entitled “Student perceptions of privacy principles for learning analytics” (Ifenthaler and Schumacher, Student perceptions of privacy principles for learning analytics. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(5), 923–938, 2016) from a practice perspective. Learning analytics (the use of data...

Learning is a complex process that is associated with many aspects of interaction and cognition (e.g., hard mental operations, cognitive friction etc.) and that can take across diverse contexts (online, classrooms, labs, maker spaces, etc.). The complexity of this process and its environments means that it is likely that no single data modality can...

Developing oral presentation skills requires both practice and expert feedback. Several systems have been developed during the last 20 years to provide ample practice opportunities and automated feedback for novice presenters. However, a comprehensive literature review discovered that none of those systems have been adequately evaluated in real lea...

The growth of Learning Analytics (LA) as a research field has been extensively documented since its beginnings. This paper provides a broad overview of the publications that Latin American authors have published in the last years by performing a quantitative review of the literature (from 2011 to 2019). A total of 282 papers were collected and cate...

This study aims to identify the conceptual structure and the thematic progress in Learning Analytics (evolution) and to elaborate on backbone/emerging topics in the field (maturity) from 2011 to September 2019. To address this objective, this paper employs hierarchical clustering, strategic diagrams and network analysis to construct the intellectua...

Learning analytics dashboards are at the core of the LAK vision to involve the human into the decision-making process. The key focus of these dashboards is to support better human sense-making and decision-making by visualising data about learners to a variety of stakeholders. Early research on learning analytics dashboards focused on the use of vi...

Sophisticated research approaches and tools can help researchers to investigate the complex processes involved in learning in various settings. The use of video technology to record classroom practices, in particular, can be a powerful way for capturing and studying learning and related phenomena within a social setting such as the classroom. This...

This work presents a methodology to generate ontologies from posts in social networks, through datamining, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques. The study analyzes students' discourses on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter networks that refer to five Ecuadorian universities, and the ontologies generated from the most relevant c...

Over 2019 the breadth of articles published in the Journal of Learning Analytics reflects the diversity of contributions to the field, including quantitative, qualitative and design-based studies and contributions through the different submission types (Research, Practical, Data and Tools, and Book Review). This year we have also published two spec...

Researchers have reported a lack of experience and low graph literacy as significant problems when making visual analytics applications available to a general audience. Therefore, it is fundamental to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different visualizations in the decision-making process. This paper explores the benefits and challenges o...

The present work describes the challenges faced during the development of a countrywide Learning Analytics study and tool focused on tracking and understanding the trajectories of Uruguayan students during their first three years of secondary education. Due to the large scale of the project, which covers an entire national educational system, sever...

Several Learning Analytics applications are limited by the cost of generating a computer understandable description of the course domain, what is called an Intelligent Curriculum. The following work contributes a novel approach to (semi-)automatically generate Intelligent Curriculum through ontologies extracted from existing learning materials such...

The present work describes the challenges faced during the development of a countrywide Learning Analytics tool focused on tracking the trajectories of Uruguayan students during their first three years of secondary education. Due to the large-scale of the project, which covers an entire national educational system, several challenges and constraint...

Editorial of the Special Section of LAK-18

Learning Analytics as a field of inquiry and community is distinct in the way that it brings together in shared pursuit, the research and practice of a particular kind of educational technology. At times this relationship approaches symbiosis: the annual LAK conference offers opportunities to learn both about the latest theoretical, methodological,...

From the perspective of Learning and Educational Technologies, academic advising has been one of the most overlooked aspects of academic support systems, despite being critical for the learning process and final success of students. The majority of higher education institutions provides simple technical support to academic advisers with basic descr...

Learning analytics is a novel educational research approach that uses data to help us understand and improve the learning process. Xavier Ochoa explains how Latin America is the perfect showcase for all that learning analytics has to offer in the arena of education.

This article presents a first step towards the definition of a visual guide for communicating uncertainty which is to fit into existing visualisation frameworks and toolkits. The first entry in our guide is made by a set of visual variables appropriate for representing areal uncertainty in algorithm mechanics. Such visualisations show users how dat...

Learning Analytics has been widely developed in European countries. Latin America is also starting to measure and optimize teaching and learning processes through Learning Analytics. However, the existing attempts in this direction are very isolated. Further efforts are needed in order to promote greater sharing of best practices between regions. A...

Developing communication skills in higher education students could be a challenge to professors due to the time needed to provide formative feedback. This work presents RAP, a scalable system to provide automatic feedback to entry-level students to develop basic oral presentation skills. The system improves the state-of-the-art by analyzing posture...

Students’ learning is ubiquitous. It happens wherever the learner is rather than being constrained to a specific physical or digital learning space (e.g. the classroom or the institutional LMS respectively). A critical question is: how to integrate and coordinate learning analytics to provide continued support to learning across physical and digita...

The present work presents the design, construction and use of a discrete event simulator for student flow in academic study periods, as a tool to improve the allocation of resources and to make decisions for the reduction of student dropout rates and optimization of the career completion time.

In the last 7 years, since the first LAK conference, Learning Analytics has grown rapidly as a field from a small group of interested scholars and practitioners to one of the most scientifically successful and institutionally accepted areas of Learning and Educational Technologies. Learning Analytics is often referred as a "Middle-Space" where expe...

Traditional classrooms are normally a noisy and chaotic environment where data collection for learning analytics has been difficult. With the aim of facilitating this task, we developed the MultimodalSelfie, a personal recording device for students, capable of recording three data streams: video of the face, audio, and notes taken during the class...

This second issue of the Journal of Learning Analytics in 2017 is the first edited by the full new journal editorial team. As the baton is passed on, we would like to thank the founding editors for their work initiating the journal and nurturing its development over the past several years. We look forward to continuing that tradition of excellence....

Over the last 20 years, there has been a strong push in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to shift from the development of research prototypes to deploying mature systems. The capability for systems to exchange information with other systems and to scale in different contexts is crucial for realizing this maturity and has been realized through the...

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) captures, integrates and analyzes learning traces from different sources in order to obtain a more holistic understanding of the learning process, wherever it happens. MMLA leverages the increasingly widespread availability of diverse sensors, high-frequency data collection technologies and sophisticated machine...

The goal of Learning Analytics is to understand and improve learning. However, learning does not always occur through or mediated by a technological system that can collect digital traces. To be able to study learning in non-technology centered environments, several signals, such as video and audio, should be captured, processed and analyzed to pro...

The present editorial introduces a special issue of the IEEE-RITA journal devoted to Strategies to Improve the Usability of Learning Object Repositories (LORs). This special issue is sponsored by the Ibero-American Program of Science and Technology for Development (CYTED) under the scope of the RIURE network (Ibero-American Network for Usability Ed...

This is a proposal for organizing a Multimodal Learning Analytics (MLA) data challenge as part of the workshop offering of the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference. It explains the motivation of the event, its objectives, target groups, expected format, organization, dissemination strategy and schedule.

This workshop on Learning Analytics for Curriculum and Program Quality Improvement investigates how LAK can drive improvements in teaching practices, instructional and curricular design, and academic program delivery. This workshop brings forward research and examples of how LAK can help build the case for instructional, curricular, or programmatic...

Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

The traditional recording of student interaction in classrooms has raised privacy concerns in both students and academics. However, the same students are happy to share their daily lives through social media. Perception of data ownership is the key factor in this paradox. This article proposes the design of a personal Multimodal Recording Device (M...

En este trabajo se presentan los procesos realizados por el Proyecto LATIn para crear la Iniciativa Latinoamericana de Libros de Texto Abiertos. Para tal fin se diseno una metodologia colaborativa, se implementaron plataformas tecnologicas adecuadas y se apoyo en una estrategia para la generacion y adopcion de libros de textos abiertos en las Unive...

La construcción de prototipos difusos es un método que permite describir a los elementos más representativos de un clúster, a través de su tipicidad. Los prototipos, como los datos más representativos de cada clúster, pueden ser usados en un proceso de clasificación como datos de entrenamiento. Estos prototipos y los clusters pueden ser construidos...

Learning Object Repositories (LOR) are an essential component of the e-Learning ecosystem and have being normally serving the purpose of cataloging, storing, retrieving and delivering Learning Objects to be used inside e-Learning applications. Next generation of LORs needs to overcome some major shortcomings current LORs present and involve other e...

This paper proposes a simple estimation of the quality of student oral presentations. It is based on the study and analysis of features extracted from the audio and digital slides of 448 presentations. The main goal of this work is to automatically predict the values assigned by professors to different criteria in a presentation evaluation rubric....

This paper identifies, by means of video and Kinect data, a set of predictors that estimate the presentation skills of 448 individual students. Two evaluation criteria were predicted: eye contact and posture and body language. Machine-learning evaluations resulted in models that predicted the performance level (good or poor) of the presenters with...

This paper summarizes the third Multimodal Learning Analytics Workshop and Grand Challenges (MLA'14). This subfield of Learning Analytics focuses on the interpretation of the multimodal interactions that occurs in learning environments, both digital and physical. This is a hybrid event that includes presentations about methods and techniques to ana...

Learning analytics has been as used a tool to improve the learning process mainly at the micro-level (courses and activities). However, another of the key promises of Learning Analytics research is to create tools that could help educational institutions at the meso- and macro-level to gain a better insight of the inner workings of their programs,...

The recent open education movement, with its most visible aspect, the MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses), brought a wide discussion regarding the potential and threats that this model could represent to traditional education, being on classroom or online. However, regarding to instructional design models for open courses, meanwhile, very little d...

Learning Object Repositories (LOR) has been usually implemented as traditional document stores. In this paper we explain the design of a Semantic Learning Repository that expand the concept of LORs to include linked information of entities not usually referred as Learning Objects, but necessary for the implementation of more advance e-learning syst...

Assessing quality of learning objects (LOs) is a difficult and complex task that normally revolves around multiples and different aspects that need to be addressed. Nowadays, quality assessment of LOs inside repositories is based on the information provided by the same community of users and experts that use such platforms. These kinds of informati...

Analyzing a conference, especially one as young and focused as LAK, provides the opportunity to observe the structure and contributions of the scientific community around it. This work will perform a Scientometric analysis, coupled with a more in-depth manual content analysis, to extract this insight from the proceedings and program of LAK 2013. Au...

La creación de libros de texto es una tarea que involucra la participación de diversos actores. Trabajar colaborativamente es una labor que no es fácil de ejecutar. Se hace necesario definir, planear y estructurar actividades que conlleven una verdadera colaboración entre los integrantes de los grupos de trabajo. En la escritura de libros esta técn...

One of the key promises of Learning Analytics research is to create tools that could help educational institutions to gain a better insight of the inner workings of their programs, in order to tune or correct them. This work presents a set of simple techniques that applied to readily available historical academic data could provide such insights. T...

Multimodal Learning Analytics is a field that studies how to process learning data from dissimilar sources in order to automatically find useful information to give feedback to the learning process. This work processes video, audio and pen strokes information included in the Math Data Corpus, a set of multimodal resources provided to the participan...

The production of high-quality open textbooks requires the collaboration of different contributors. This work conducts a comparative analysis of the six different collaborative platforms for the production of books. To be able to compare the platforms, several dimensions extracted from literature of collaborative writing and the requirements associ...