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This study explores the effects of interpolated testing and writing self-explanations on self-caught mind wandering and knowledge gain during a learning task. Participants watch a 15-minute video about the human nervous system and are divided into three groups: control, interpolated testing, and self-explanation. Mind wandering frequency and knowledge gain are measured and compared across the groups.

Digital higher education continues its evolution towards a wider use of technology to support learning experiences. The global pandemic has elevated new sets of educational challenges that highlight the importance of technology as a critical component of contemporary education systems. However, reliance on technology also raises concerns about sustaining support in these new modes of delivery while effectively promoting the attainment of learning objectives. Learning analytics offers the possibility of supporting designers and educators to gain a deeper understanding of how learners are engaging and progressing in their learning process. Increased understanding opens the door to a higher level of personalization to meet the diverse range of learners. However, achieving this connection between comprehensive data sets and personalization requires the combination of design, delivery and analytics and the participation of various stakeholder groups. This chapter presents the conceptual Learning Analytics Model for Personalization (LAMP) to represent the relationships between the elements in a digital learning experience with comprehensive data capture and personalized learner support actions. The model is showcased in the context of the provision of personalized learner feedback.

Digital education, now common in higher education, is particularly evident in the expansion of blended and fully online offerings at universities. Central to this expansion are educational developers, staff who support teaching and learning improvement in courses they do not themselves teach. Working closely with staff, students, and the curriculum, educational developers see first-hand how the digital learning agenda is both implemented and experienced. This article reports on findings from a national study of three educational development groups: academic developers, academic language and learning developers, and online educational designers, from 14 Australian universities. Although their institutional settings, roles, and work practices varied considerably, a central theme was the tension arising from a perceived shift in institutional priorities from 'people development' to 'product development': that is, from building human (educator) capacity towards curriculum resource development, particularly for the online environment. Participants reported a decline in autonomy, with institutional strategy and targeted projects increasingly directing both the work that gets done, and the skill sets required to do it. Their observations have implications for how universities conceptualise the development and support of the educational process. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the effects of instructional conditions and prior experience on students' self-reflection. The study was conducted with the use of a video annotation tool that was used by undergraduate performing arts students to reflect on their video-recorded performances. The study shows a consistent positive effect of previous experience with the video annotation tool for engagement with reflection. Graded instructional conditions with feedback had a positive effect on increasing higher order reflections particularly for students with prior experience with the video annotation tool for reflective purposes. The finding suggests that when including reflection in the curriculum, it is important to consider introducing it at a program or degree level rather than individual courses in order to provide an opportunity for students to gain experience with reflection and any particular tool that is used (e.g., a video annotation tool). Furthermore, reflective tasks should be scaffolded into the curriculum with ample opportunity for formative feedback and summative assessment in order to encourage higher order thinking and foster students' metacognitive awareness and monitoring for increased goal-setting and acknowledgement of the motive or effect of their observed behavior. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There is little debate regarding the importance of student feedback for improving the learning process. However, there remain significant workload barriers for instructors that impede their capacity to provide timely and meaningful feedback. The increasing role technology is playing in the education space may provide novel solutions to this impediment. As students interact with the various learning technologies in their course of study, they create digital traces that can be captured and analysed. These digital traces form the new kind of data that are frequently used in learning analytics to develop actionable recommendations that can support student learning. This paper explores the use of such analytics to address the challenges impeding the capacity of instructors to provide personalised feedback at scale. The case study reported in the paper showed how the approach was associated with a positive impact on student perception of feedback quality and on academic achievement. The study was conducted with first year undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computer systems course with a blended learning design across three consecutive years (N2013 = 290, N2014 = 316 and N2015 = 415).

Prior education studies have consistently emphasized the importance of sustained and active student engagement to aid academic performance and achievement of learning outcomes (e.g., Hockings, Cooke,Yamashita, McGinty, & Bowl, 2008; Michael, 2006). The positive impact of such active learning models on academic outcomes has been well established, particularly, in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper presents the results of a natural experiment investigating the effects of instructional conditions and experience on the adoption and sustained use of a learning tool. The experiment was conducted with undergraduate students, enrolled into four performing art courses (N = 77) at a research intensive university in Canada. The students used the video annotation software CLAS for course-based self-assessment on their performances. Although existing research offers insights into the factors predicting students’ intentions of accepting a learning tool, much less is known about factors that affect actual adoption and sustained tool use. The study explored the use of CLAS amongst undergraduate students in four courses across two consecutive semesters. Trace data of students’ tool use, graph-based measures of metacognitive monitoring, and text cohesion of video annotations were used to estimate the volume of tool use and the quality of the learning strategy and learning products created. The results confirmed that scaffolding (e.g., graded activity with instructional feedback) is required to guide students’ initial tool use, although scaffolding did not have an independent significant effect on the quantity of tool use. The findings demonstrated that the use of the tool is strongly influenced by the experience an individual student gains from scaffolded conditions. That is, the students sustained their use of the learning tool in future courses even when the tool use was not graded nor was instructional feedback provided. An important implication is that students’ tool use is not solely driven by motivation – rather, it is shaped by instructional conditions and experience with the tool use. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This issue is a call for researchers and practitioners to reflect on progress to date and understand the criticality of theory – how it facilitates interpretation of findings but also how it can also restrict and confine our thinking through the assumptions many theoretical models bring. As education paradigms further shift and juxtapose informal and formal learning settings there is a need to re-visit any underlying theoretical assumptions.

This editorial discusses events that marked the period since the publication of the previous issue – the 5th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2015), Learning Analytics Summer Institutes (LASIs 2015), and Learning Analytics Policy Briefing in the European Parliament. This period saw releases of two important publications for system-wide implementation of learning analytics in higher education published by Jisc and the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching. An important recognition of the maturation of the field of learning analytics is the recent publication of the 2015 Google Scholar Metrics identifying the LAK proceedings as the only conference proceedings among the 20 most cited publication venues in educational technology. Building bridges for enhancing impact is another important activity for the field maturation through developing linkages of learning analytics with educational data mining, user modeling, the learning sciences, technology enhanced learning, cyber-learning, and learning at scale. This editorial also introduces a special section published in this issue dedicated to the exploration of connections between self-regulated learning and learning analytics, introduces two regular research papers featured in this issue and describes several special sections that will be published in future issues of the journal.

The higher education sector has seen a shift in teaching approaches over the past decade with an increase in the use of video for delivering lecture content as part of a flipped classroom or blended learning model. Advances in video technologies have provided opportunities for students to now annotate videos as a strategy to support their achievement of the intended learning outcomes. However, there are few studies exploring the relationship between video annotations, student approaches to learning, and academic performance. This study seeks to narrow this gap by investigating the impact of students' use of video annotation software coupled with their approaches to learning and academic performance in the context of a flipped learning environment. Preliminary findings reveal a significant positive relationship between annotating videos and exam results. However, negative effects of surface approaches to learning, cognitive strategy use and test anxiety on midterm grades were also noted. This indicates a need to better promote and scaffold higher order cognitive strategies and deeper learning with the use of video annotation software. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper reports on a subset of findings from a larger study investigating resistance from academic staff to the integration of technology with on-campus foreign language teaching at one North American higher education institution. The study revealed that the factors influencing technology adoption paralleled Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model’s tenets of perceived usefulness and ease of use. Further, this study supports Lai and Savage’s (2013) assertion of a lack of attention to the pedagogical affordances of technology when adoption decisions are made by instructors, thus we highlight the need for higher education leaders to determine strategies promoting awareness of the benefits technology-enabled teaching and learning can bring to advance educationally-rich flexible learning opportunities. Cet article traite d’un sous-ensemble de résultats provenant d’une étude plus vaste ayant enquêté sur la résistance des universitaires envers l’intégration de la technologie à l’enseignement en langue étrangère sur le campus dans un établissement nord-américain d’études supérieures. L’étude a révélé que les facteurs ayant une influence sur l’adoption de la technologie coïncident avec les principes du modèle d’acceptation de la technologie de Davis sur l’utilité perçue et la facilité d’utilisation. De plus, cette étude appuie l’assertion de Lai et Savage (2013) d’un manque d’attention envers les affordances pédagogiques de la technologie lorsque les décisions d’adoption sont prises par les formateurs. Nous soulignons donc le besoin, pour les meneurs de l’éducation supérieure, de déterminer les stratégies qui favorisent la connaissance des avantages de l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage que permet la technologie pour faire progresser les occasions d’apprentissage flexibles et riches sur le plan éducatif.

Although video annotation software is no longer considered as a new innovation, its application in promoting student self-regulated learning and reflection skills has only begun to emerge in the research literature. Advances in text and video analytics provide the capability of investigating students’ use of the tool and the psychometrics and linguistic processes evident in their written annotations. This paper reports on a study exploring students’ use of a video annotation tool when two different instructional approaches were deployed – graded and non-graded self-reflection annotations within two courses in the performing arts. In addition to counts and temporal locations of self-reflections, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Counts (LIWC) framework was used for the extraction of variables indicative of the linguistic and psychological processes associated with self-reflection annotations of videos. The results indicate that students in the course with graded selfreflections adopted more linguistic and psychological related processes in comparison to the course with non-graded selfreflections. In general, the effect size of the graded reflections was lower for students who took both courses in parallel. Consistent with prior research, the study identified that students tend to make the majority of their self-reflection annotations early in the video time line. The paper also provides several suggestions for future research to better understand the application of video annotations in facilitating student learning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed