Papers by Denise Whitelock
INTED2022 Proceedings
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analyse their own use of language by comparing their linguistic choices with the patterns and str... more analyse their own use of language by comparing their linguistic choices with the patterns and structures retrieved from a corpus. The retrieval and analysis of language use in context thus provides learners with a research-based understanding of language forms and functions. The corpus-based approach can be applied in many areas including learning languages for specific purposes, teaching text analysis, support for writing in a particular genre, and scrutiny of existing textbooks to discover their features and to suggest improvements. It can also enable comparisons between word usage or concepts in different languages to help develop cultural awareness. Researchers maintain that there is a need for more corpora that are accessible, diverse and adaptable for language instruction. 5. A therapist chatbot ('Sometimes you need to talk things through, but everyone seems to have an opinion or analysis of your situation. All you need is someone who will listen and ask the right questions to help you figure things out.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This seventh report, produced by The Open University in collaboration with the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen, Norway, proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education in their current form.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactiv... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This eighth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (UK) collaborated with researchers from the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. We proposed a long list of new educational concepts, terms, theories, and practices and pared them down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation. Debates around AI increasingly focus on what is unique to humans that we need to preserve and perhaps amplify. It is often argued that critical thinking and creativity are uniquely human. Aspects of communication and collaboration are also (still) uniquely human, such as the ability to appreciate a humorous remark, or to work towards a solution to a problem by conducting several conversations across multiple media. Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers
Open World Learning, 2022
本报告提出了在教学应用方面呈现端倪的“十大创新教学法”，包括跨界学习、论证学习、随机 学习、基于情境的学习、计算思维、利用远程实验室在科学实验中学习、具身学习、适应性教学、情绪分析 和隐性评价，... more 本报告提出了在教学应用方面呈现端倪的“十大创新教学法”，包括跨界学习、论证学习、随机 学习、基于情境的学习、计算思维、利用远程实验室在科学实验中学习、具身学习、适应性教学、情绪分析 和隐性评价，预期这些方法有可能在教育实践中，尤其是在学校后继续教育中引发重大变革。
The 2018 AIED conference workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? was an important but only a first st... more The 2018 AIED conference workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? was an important but only a first step towards addressing the far-reaching ethical questions raised by the field of AIED. The reality is that, although there are encouraging signs, most AIED research, development and deployment continues to take place in what is essentially a moral vacuum. In short, still today, little research has been undertaken, no guidelines have been provided, no policies have been developed, and no regulations have been enacted to address the specific ethical issues raised by the application of AI in educational contexts. For these reasons, for the AIED 2019 conference, we are proposing a second ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? workshop. This will build on the outcomes of the first workshop (which includes a journal paper and commissioned book proposal). It will be an opportunity for researchers who are exploring AIED ethical issues to share their insights, to identify key ethical issues, to map out how to...
Humanoid intelligent agents, or ‘Holographic AIs’, as we prefer, are trending, promising improved... more Humanoid intelligent agents, or ‘Holographic AIs’, as we prefer, are trending, promising improved delivery of personalized services on smart glasses and in Augmented Reality. Lacking clarity of the concept and missing recommendations for their features, however, pose a challenge to developers of these novel, embodied agents. In this paper, we therefore conduct a comparative analysis of nine intelligent agents who can interact with both physical and virtual surroundings. We identify, select, and investigate four distinct types of nonplayer game characters, chatbot agents, simulation agents, and intelligent tutors in order to, subsequently, develop a framework of features and affordances for holographic AIs along the axes of appearance, behavior, intelligence, and responsiveness. Through our analysis, we derive preliminary recommendations for developers of Holographic AIs: the use case determines appearance; dialogue management is key; awareness and adaptation are equally important fo...
One of the challenges facing higher education is understanding what counts for an excellent educa... more One of the challenges facing higher education is understanding what counts for an excellent educational outcome. Historically academic performance was a variable of choice for measuring ‘excellence’ in education, but more recently a concept of learning gain, which can be defined as change in knowledge, skills and personal development across time (e.g., Andrews et al., 2011; Boyas et al., 2012) gained momentum. Educational research also mainly looked at cognitive gain largely ignoring affective changes (attitude) and behaviour (Tempelaar et al., 2015a). Current research aims to address this gap by developing and testing an Affective-Behaviour-Cognition model of learning gains using longitudinal multilevel modelling. The learner-generated affective-behaviour-cognition data was retrieved from university database for 80,000+ undergraduate students who started their degree in autumn 2013/14. The preliminary multilevel modelling revealed that cognitive and behaviour learning gains are wel...
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learning
Plagiarism continues to remain an ever-present issue throughout academia. It is an anathema to sc... more Plagiarism continues to remain an ever-present issue throughout academia. It is an anathema to scholarly enterprise, where the proper attribution of the work of others is of fundamental importance. Teaching students the importance of citing and referencing the work of others, and how to correctly do so, is therefore an important role for academic institutions. It is insufficient to teach these things without assessing students’ learning. Effective and accessible tools that can assist in teaching and assessment are sought and are increasingly being developed. This paper describes a new tool designed to assess levels of plagiarism in students’ submitted work and considers its affordances alongside other established tools. TeSLA is an EU funded project that brings eighteen partners together for the development of an embedded suite of tools to deliver the seamless e-authentication of students as they complete online assessments. Within the suite is a plagiarism detection tool that analy...
The chapter introduces the current state of the art of technology for E-Assessment for Learning. ... more The chapter introduces the current state of the art of technology for E-Assessment for Learning. A large amount of literature is reviewed with respect to formative assessment, feedback and E-Assessment for Learning. Three case studies introduced single innovative approaches of assessment for learning. These include details of OpenEssayist which is a real-time learning analytics tool using natural language processing techniques to give students feedback on draft essays. A mobile notification system together with automatic item generation techniques for e-assessment systems are also discussed.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation.
As many universities increase their online provision, there is a growing need for advances in at ... more As many universities increase their online provision, there is a growing need for advances in at least one aspect of e-assessment: that of ensuring the individual doing the assessment is who the institution thinks they are, eauthentication. When online assessment is used solely for formative assessment, where assessment and feedback are focussed on learning rather than evaluating for the award of credit, this is not an issue. However, where online assessment is intended to contribute to a student's overall grading, institutions must be confident it is the student's work that is being marked. In the current environment this constraint places strong limits on the options for online assessment. The EU-funded TeSLA project - Adaptive Trust-based e-Assessment System for Learning (http://tesla-project.eu) has developed a suite of instruments aimed at addressing this need. The suite is designed to integrate within a university's virtual learning environment and includes face re...
EDULEARN16 Proceedings, 2016
This paper reports the findings of a large-scale survey in to the student experience of assessmen... more This paper reports the findings of a large-scale survey in to the student experience of assessment at the UK's largest distance learning university. Three key aspects of assessment were covered in the survey: formative assessment, revision for examination and the examination/end of module; with a view of providing insight for more effective learning designers and learning analytics. This analysis meets an urgent need to better understand the assessment analytics associated with the 'revision' periodthe weeks leading up to an examination that may be crucial in ensuring student assessment success, building confidence, and improving progression to the next course. Using results from an online questionnaire (n=281) sent to undergraduate distance learners and follow-up telephone interviews (n=13), this paper will examine some of the relationships between the revision and examination experience. Specific regard will be paid to usefulness of revision resources, time spent revising, enjoyment, reflection and learning, exam preparedness and clarity, mark satisfaction and score received. The paper will begin with an overview of the central findings of the survey, followed by a focus on the relationship between the 'revision' period and the examination itself. In particular, aspects of student experience, performance and self-reported learning effort will be explored. The research represents an important step in extending the scope of assessment analytics and in better understanding the opportunities for providing more timely, targeted or personalised learning support. Key findings of the analysis reported are that revising for an exam and the exam itself are relatively distinct experiences; there is no significant correlation between time spent revising, usefulness of revision resources and module exam score. Similarly, revision for learning, revision design and satisfaction with revision resources appear as distinct factors in the student experience. These results have clear implications for the design and teaching of assessment.
Educational visions: The lessons from 40 years of innovation, Dec 18, 2019
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The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019
University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher e... more University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is that they do not consider the specific characteristics of online education. This study used a participatory approach to define a set of criteria and indicators suitable to reflect the specific nature of distance education. This endeavour will help evaluate and rank online higher education institutions more appropriately than in current practice, where indicators are devised for traditional universities. To this end, several stakeholders and informants were involved in a Delphi study in an attempt to reach the broader higher education institutions (HEI) community. According to the study participants, apart from students’ achievements and ge...
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Papers by Denise Whitelock