Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Item
    Translating the Concept of Goal Setting into Practice: What ‘else’ Does It Require than a Goal Setting Tool?
    (Setúbal, Portugal : Science and Technology Publications, Lda, 2020) Kismihók, Gábor; Zhao, Catherine; Schippers, Michaéla; Mol, Stefan; Harrison, Scott; Shehata, Shady; Lane, H. Chad; Zvacek, Susan; Uhomoibhi, James
    This conceptual paper reviews the current status of goal setting in the area of technology enhanced learning and education. Besides a brief literature review, three current projects on goal setting are discussed. The paper shows that the main barriers for goal setting applications in education are not related to the technology, the available data or analytical methods, but rather the human factor. The most important bottlenecks are the lack of students’ goal setting skills and abilities, and the current curriculum design, which, especially in the observed higher education institutions, provides little support for goal setting interventions.
  • Item
    OER Recommendations to Support Career Development
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Faraji, Ali; Mol, Stefan T.; Kismihók, Gábor
    This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous and strategic about their own skill development. Subsequently, high-quality, on-line, personalized educational content and services are also essential to serve this high demand for learning content. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have high potential to contribute to the mitigation of these problems, as they are available in a wide range of learning and occupational contexts globally. However, their applicability has been limited, due to low metadata quality and complex quality control. These issues resulted in a lack of personalised OER functions, like recommendation and search. Therefore, we suggest a novel, personalised OER recommendation method to match skill development targets with open learning content. This is done by: 1) using an OER quality prediction model based on metadata, OER properties, and content; 2) supporting learners to set individual skill targets based on actual labour market information, and 3) building a personalized OER recommender to help learners to master their skill targets. Accordingly, we built a prototype focusing on Data Science related jobs, and evaluated this prototype with 23 data scientists in different expertise levels. Pilot participants used our prototype for at least 30 minutes and commented on each of the recommended OERs. As a result, more than 400 recommendations were generated and 80.9% of the recommendations were reported as useful.
  • Item
    Combining statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students’ attitudes towards ICT in PISA
    (London : Taylor & Francis, 2021) Lezhnina, Olga; Kismihók, Gábor
    In our age of big data and growing computational power, versatility in data analysis is important. This study presents a flexible way to combine statistics and machine learning for data analysis of a large-scale educational survey. The authors used statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students’ attitudes towards information and communication technology (ICT) in relation to mathematical and scientific literacy measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 and 2018. Implementations of the random forest (RF) algorithm were applied to impute missing data and to predict students’ proficiency levels in mathematics and science. Hierarchical linear models (HLM) were built to explore relationships between attitudes towards ICT and mathematical and scientific literacy with the focus on the nested structure of the data. ICT autonomy was an important variable in RF models, and associations between this attitude and literacy scores in HLM were significant and positive, while for other ICT attitudes the associations were negative (ICT in social interaction) or non-significant (ICT competence and ICT interest). The need for further research on ICT autonomy is discussed, and benefits of combining statistical and machine learning approaches are outlined.