Speaker: Shirley Ho
Title: Informal Learning in a Digital World: Misinformation about Science & the Responsibilities of the Scientific Community

Learning often goes beyond physical and digital classroom settings. The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered an infodemic, represented by an unprecedented overabundance of online and offline information. Likewise, when facing complex scientific topics, the public may be exposed to misinformation that can either support or inhibit the process of informed personal decision-making. How do the informal learning processes look like? Are interventions such as fact-checking and enhancing digital media literacy among the public effective in increasing their ability to discern accurate information from misinformation? An underexplored way to combat false claims is through engagement of the scientific community. Scientists can provide evidence-based, scientifically defensible information to refute false claims regarding the pandemic. How can we enable long-term engagement of scientists to identify and address false claims about emerging science and technologies? This talk will cast a spotlight on the responsibilities of the scientific community in taking a more proactive role in preventing the spread of mis- and disinformation, potentially enabling a more conducive environment for informal learning of scientific topics.

Bio: Shirley Ho is the Associate Vice President for Humanities, Social Sciences & Research Communication in the President’s Office at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She is concurrently Professor of Communication in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI) at NTU. Her research area focuses on cross-cultural public opinion dynamics related to science and technology, with potential health or environmental impacts.

Speaker: Ioana Jivet
Title: Supporting Student Agency with Learning Analytics

The pandemic forced higher education institutions to move fully online and even as face-to-face teaching becomes feasible again, the majority of students wish to continue online learning, either in a hybrid or blended format. This is a huge opportunity for learning analytics research to step up their game and concentrate on developing tools that support students to become masters of their own learning. As more students spend more time in online learning environments without the explicit guidance of teachers, the traces students leave in the digital world can be used to generate and provide actionable and supportive feedback on their performance, study behaviour and even self-regulated learning strategies. In this talk I will illustrate how student-facing learning analytics can support students learning online and touch upon the challenges of designing and implementnig trustworthy and meaningful analytics.

Bio: Ioana Jivet is a postdoctoral researcher at DIPF and Research Coordinator at studiumdigitale, Goethe University Frankfurt, where she leads research activities on Trusted Learning Analytics under the Hessen Hub, a network of higher education institutions in Hessen, Germany. Ioana’s research addresses design and adoption aspects of student-facing learning analytics. Ioana obtained her PhD Cum Laude in March 2021 at the Open University of the Netherlands on learning analytics dashboards design that foster the development of self-regulated learning skills in Higher Education and MOOCs. Since 2021, Ioana serves as a member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research Executive Board.

Speaker: Jennifer Olsen
Title: Supporting Flexibility in Post-Pandemic Higher Education

As the global pandemic continues to influence our daily lives, we begin to see that it has had a lasting impact on the educational landscape. In this talk, I will discuss how the design of educational technology has had to adapt to changes in both teaching and learning with a focus on higher education. Particularly, I will look at how the need for additional flexibility given the heightened uncertainty introduced by sudden student and teacher absence, hybrid learning, and other novel educational factors have influenced educational designs and what factors we may need to account for in the near future.

Bio: Jennifer Olsen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Diego where she leads projects investigating how to provide orchestration support to instructors and the use of multimodal learning analytics in collaborative learning. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017 from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute as a fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research and a Siebel Scholar. Dr. Olsen has additionally been a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction Lab at EPFL. Her broader research goals include the promotion of educational technology and learning analytics to support students and instructors in their engagement with complex pedagogical scenarios.