Educational Data Analytics for Teachers and School Leaders

Educational Data Analytics (EDA) have been attributed with significant benefits for enhancing on-demand personalized educational support of individual learners as well as reflective course (re)design for achieving more authentic teaching, learning and assessment experiences integrated into real work-oriented tasks.

This open access textbook is a tutorial for developing, practicing and self-assessing core competences on educational data analytics for digital teaching and learning. It combines theoretical knowledge on core issues related to collecting, analyzing, interpreting and using educational data, including ethics and privacy concerns. The textbook provides questions and teaching materials/ learning activities as quiz tests of multiple types of questions, added after each section, related to the topic studied or the video(s) referenced. These activities reproduce real-life contexts by using a suitable use case scenario (storytelling), encouraging learners to link theory with practice; self-assessed assignments enabling learners to apply their attained knowledge and acquired competences on EDL. 

By studying this book, you will know where to locate useful educational data in different sources and understand their limitations; know the basics for managing educational data to make them useful; understand relevant methods; and be able to use relevant tools; know the basics for organising, analysing, interpreting and presenting learner-generated data within their learning context, understand relevant learning analytics methods and be able to use relevant learning analytics tools; know the basics for analysing and interpreting educational data to facilitate educational decision making, including course and curricula design, understand relevant teaching analytics methods and be able to use relevant teaching analytics tools; understand issues related with educational data ethics and privacy.

This book is intended for school leaders and teachers engaged in blended (using the flipped classroom model) and online (during COVID-19 crisis and beyond) teaching and learning; e-learning professionals (such as, instructional designers and e-tutors) of online and blended courses; instructional technologists; researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate university students studying education, educational technology and relevant fields.

Sofia Mougiakou is a Computer Science teacher in secondary education since 1996. She holds a B.Sc. in “Informatics and Telecommunications” (November 1994) from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, a M.Sc. in “Electronic Automation” (June 1998) from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, as well as a M.Sc. with distinction in e-Learning from the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece (June 2020). She has two years of administrative experience as a high school principal and 10 years as Head of the Center of Informatics and New Technologies of the Directorate of Secondary Education of Piraeus. She has 15 years of teaching experience as a computer science teacher in secondary education. She participated as a member of the Education Committee in two co-funded European projects for teachers’ professional development, as well as in the Learn2Analyze project (Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance Program). She has several conference publications regarding the exploiting of blended learning using the Moodle Learning Platform at the high-school level. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece.

Dimitra Vinatsella holds a B.Sc. in “Informatics & Telecommunications” (2003) and a M.Sc. in ”Communication Systems and Networks” (2007) from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She started to work as a Product Development Manager in Vodafone Greece responsible to act as an overall project manager for the planning, development, roll out and post launch monitoring of retail

commercial Value Added Services and Products. In 2007, she joined the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, as Computer Science Teacher and since 2012 she has been working in a cross-functional team in the Center of Informatics and New Technologies of the Directorate of Secondary Education of Piraeus. She has a long experience in e-Learning utilizing innovative technologies and learning management systems and she has participated successfully in several scientific research European programmes, including the Learn2Analyze project. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece.

Demetrios Sampson is a Professor of Digital Systems for Teaching and Learning at the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece since 2003. He has been a Professor of Learning Technologies and Director of Research at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia (2015-2017) and Senior Research (1999-2003) at the Information Technologies Institute of the Center for Research and Technology – Hellas (CERTH).He is the co-author of 350 articles in scientific books, journals and conferences, and the editor of 90+ books, special issues in academic journals and international conference proceedings books. He has received 10 times Best Paper Award in International Conferences on Learning Technologies. He has been a Keynote/Invited Speaker/Lecturer in 100+ International/National Conferences and/or Postgraduate Programs around the world; project director, principle investigator and/or research consultant in 70 Research and Innovation projects with external funding at the range of 16 Million€. He has supervised 180+ honours and postgraduate students to successful completion since 2003. He has developed and delivers the first Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on the use of Educational Data Analytics by School Teachers (Analytics for the Classroom Teacher), offered by the edX platform (a Harvard and MIT led global initiative) which has attracted more than 25.000 participants from 180 countries around the world since October 2016. He lead an international University-Industry Consortium (Learn2Analyse) that promotesd professional development in Educational Data Literacy for Online Education & Training Professionals and Higher Education students, co-funded by the European Commission (Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance Program, 2018-2021). He is the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award (July 2012) and was named a Golden Core Member of IEEE Computer Society in recognition of his contribution to the field of Learning Technologies. He is also the recipient of the Golden Nikola Tesla Chain Award of the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP) for "International outstanding achievements in the field of Engineering Pedagogy" (September 2018).

Zacharoula Papamitsiou (she/her) is a Research Scientist at the Department of Technology Management, SINTEF Digital. Dr. Papamitsiou holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, in adapting and personalizing assessment using Learning Analytics. Her research interest is on learning analytics, user modeling, autonomous learning, digital transformation, human-computer interaction, and trustworthy AI. She has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers in highly ranked journals, conferences, and book chapters (including British Journal of Educational Technologies, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE TLT, Information Systems Frontiers, LAK, UMAP, ICER, and many more), she is a reviewer in more than 10 highly ranked journals (including Computers and Education, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions in Learning Technologies, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Journal of Learning Analytics), and she has served/serves as guest editor in prestigious journals (e.g., Frontier in Artificial Intelligence) and in various organization committees

(e.g., associate chair) and program committees. She is professional member of ACM, IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technology, and founding member of the Trondheim-ACM-W Chapter. She has been involved in several projects, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, European Commission (e.g., Horizon 2020, Erasmus+) or other national or international associations (e.g., Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Innovation Norway, NordForsk). In 2017, she received the Martin Wolpers Award for the research project of the most promising young researcher. Dr. Papamitsiou is also recipient of the ERCIM fellowship and has completed her Postdoctoral research at the Computer Science Department, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Michail Giannakos is a professor of interaction design and learning technologies at the Department of Computer Science of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is the head of the Learner-Computer Interaction lab and his research focuses on the design and study of emerging technologies in online and hybrid education settings, and on developing new ways for humans to interact with interactive learning systems. Giannakos has co-authored more than 200 manuscripts published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and conferences (including Computers & Education, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Pervasive Computing, IEEE TLT, BIT, BJET, ACM IDC, ICLS/CSCL, Interact). Giannakos is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (Elsevier). He is also in the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions in Learning Technology, IEEE Transactions on Education, Behaviour & Information Technology and the International Journal of Information Management, and has served as a guest editor on highly recognized journals. He has served as an evaluator for the European Commission (EC) and the US-NSF, and he recently co-edited the Multimodal Learning Analytics handbook (Springer) and authored a book on Experimental Studies in Learning Technology and Child–Computer Interaction (Springer). Giannakos has worked at several research projects funded by diverse sources like the European Commission, Microsoft Research, The Research Council of Norway (RCN), US-NSF, the German agency for international academic cooperation and Cheng Endowment. Giannakos is one of the experts in the Norwegian task force (formed by the ministry of education and research) for introducing learning analytics to Norwegian K-12 schools and universities. He is also a recipient of a Marie Curie/ERCIM fellowship, the Norwegian Young Research Talent award and he is one of the outstanding academic fellows of NTNU (2017-2022).

Dirk Ifenthaler is Professor and Chair of Learning, Design and Technology at University of Mannheim, Germany and UNESCO Deputy Chair of Data Science in Higher Education Learning and Teaching at Curtin University, Australia. His previous roles include Professor and Director, Centre for Research in Digital Learning at Deakin University, Australia, Manager of Applied Research and Learning Analytics at Open Universities, Australia, and Professor for Applied Teaching and Learning Research at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was a 2012 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Dirk’s research focuses on the intersection of cognitive psychology, educational technology, data analytics, and organisational learning. His research outcomes include numerous co-authored books, book series, book chapters, journal articles, and international conference papers, as well as successful grant funding in Australia, Germany, and USA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Technology, Knowledge and Learning. He received the 2016 Outstanding International Research Collaboration Award from AERA (American Educational Research Association), the 2015 Presidential Award from AECT (Association for

Educational Communications and Technology), and the 2012 Outstanding Journal Article Award from AECT, as well as the 2006 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the University of Freiburg, Germany. He published more than 250 journal articles, book chapters and books and has received over 7876 citations resulting in an h-index of 45 (Google Scholar, June).