NVL

The Leeds Institute of Medical Education (LIME) within the School of Medicine have seen a growing use of Technology Enhanced Learning for the last 5 years, with over 3000 students using mobile devices as part of their undergraduate medical education. The project aimed at exploiting this achievement further by delivering personalised feedback on learning and assessment to live cohorts, as well as supporting building capacity in TEL across the Faculty. [...]

The Digital Health Institute (DHI) is a Scottish Funding Council innovation centre led by the University of Edinburgh and the Glasgow School of Art. At the core of the DHI program of work are the “Experience Labs”, a person-centred and design-driven research approach that provides opportunities for extreme collaboration in a safe and flexible environment where academics, business and civic partners can co-create and co-design sustainable solutions together with end-users. The environment of the [...]

The SAFeSEA project was an EPSRC-funded collaboration between The Open University and Oxford University, investigating how extractive summarisation techniques could be used to analyse students' essays and generate appropriate formative feedback. Writing summaries has been a long-standing educational activity but using summaries of your own writing as a source of reflection remains a more open issue. Can existing methods of information extraction and summarization be adapted to select content for [...]

The project was the result of collaboration between the Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI) and the NIHR National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing (NBRUH). The aim of the collaboration was to investigate how auditory perceptual learning, educational technologies and game design could be combined into an approach of training suitable for use by individuals outside the laboratory, e.g. on home computers, tablets or mobile devices. The approach I took was to re-consider how auditory trai [...]

As part of the "Making Things" workshop at LKL, which aimed at promoting dialogue about technology and design through engaging with the processes and practices of making, I have been working with Dr Brock Craft on a couple of small projects exploring the (collaborative) use of tangibles in educational context. One of these collaborations, the Spot-On project , was the result of a successful short grant on exploring the use of wireless sensor motes (Sun SPOT API), as well the combination of phys [...]

The JISC-funded MyPlan project has targeted the independent lifelong learner by creating a web-based system that allows users to record and share their learning pathways, i.e. the record of every educational and personal life episodes that are seen as having an impact on their development. My responsibility in the second phase of the project was to develop functionalities for the personalised creation, searching and recommendations of learning pathways through courses and modules in Further and [...]

Student modelling has been an early research topic in Artificial Intelligence in Education; various techniques have been used to recognize and adapt to the student’s behaviour and knowledge. Currently, the major growth directions of research are in open student modelling, group modelling, and the modelling of affect, attitude, motivation and other aspects of the student beyond that of the student’s grasp of the content being learned. Open Learner Modelling (OLM), i.e., a scrutable, inspectable, [...]

Many advantages are claimed for learning environments that use multiple external representations (like graphs, tables, animations, etc.) but research assessing their impact on learning has produced mixed results. My main contribution to this project was to develop a simulation-based learning environment (DEMIST, Design Environment for Multi-representational Instructional Simulation Technology) as a research platform and use it for further understanding of the use of multiple representations. Dur [...]

My PhD thesis addressed the problem of how to design Interactive Learning Environments (ILEs) that could be more adapted and adaptable to teachers' needs. My approach was to propose a participatory design process that involved teachers at every step of the production cycle. This process was made possible by incremental prototyping and by redefining teachers' role in a multi-disciplinary development team and their integration as actors in the process. I also proposed a framework for extracting [...]

When learners make errors when constructing a planar geometrical figure according to a teacher's formal specification, provide relevant explanation is a difficult task for an ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System) diagnosing their behaviour. I based my approach to solving this problem on the assumption that learners' productions are consistent with their reasoning. Then by using induction on the domain theory and learners' examples, it was possible to construct a theory that could explain these [...]