Partners

HETA is funded by the Australian Technology Network (ATN) Grants Scheme for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (2018), and is a joint project among all five ATN institutions: University of Technology Sydney (lead), Curtin University, Queensland University of Technology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and University of South Australia.

Investigators

(CI) Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum holds a Chair in Learning Informatics at the University of Technology Sydney, where he is Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre, an applied innovation centre to advance the university’s use of analytics. He leads the university’s learning analytics, a topic on which he is a regular keynote speaker. He was a co‐founder and a Vice-President of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), where he continues to serve on the Executive. He coordinated the international network of Learning Analytics Summer Institutes (2013-16), and served as Program Co‐Chair for the 2012 & 2018 International Conferences on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. He has been a Chief and Partner Investigator on numerous projects ($10.8M total), including three Australian OLT Projects on Learning Analytics.

(PI: Project Technical Lead): Dr Andrew Gibson is a Lecturer at QUT Information Systems School. He led the technical development of TAP and AcaWriter while at UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (2015-17). His research focuses on reflective writing analytics for psychosocial meaning, and he has written software that utilise a range of natural language processing and machine learning techniques for this purpose. With an additional interest in transdisciplinarity, he works across both educational and computational domains. He has been developing Java applications for educational organisations for over 20 years, and has been working with Scala, AWS and learning analytics for the past 4 years.

(PI: UniSA lead): Prof. Shane Dawson is the Director of the Teaching Innovation Unit and Professor of Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia. The TIU functions to lead and transform learning and teaching practices at UniSA through collaborative capacity building processes and researching the application of digital technologies in higher education.

(PI: Curtin Lead): Prof. David Gibson is Director of Learning Futures at Curtin University, a team focusing on strategic innovations that advance the mission of the university. The team shapes the future of learning and teaching at the university through human and technological capacity building and promotes faculty-based research as well as continuous improvement using learning analytics. The team’s programs influence and impact students, staff and the broader community by leading and managing early stage innovation projects that range across formal and informal learning innovations, pathways & partnerships, the UniReady enabling program, and learning analytics. The team’s data scientist helps lead the university’s growth in capacity in analytics-based insights through a community of practice, which has participation from five senior executive areas of the university. David is currently in the final stages of establishing the UNESCO Chair for Data Science in Higher Education Learning and Teaching.

(PI: RMIT Lead): Dr Pablo Munguia is an Associate Professor and Director of Learning Environments and Analytics within the Education Portfolio at RMIT. The Learning Analytics unit at RMIT is in charge of student surveys, collaborating with academics through communities of practice and providing student-driven mechanisms through models and tools. Work from this unit is presented at LASI and LAK conferences. Learning analytics is coupled with the Learning Environments uni by providing insights into course design, correct pedagogical use of the LMS and digital tools therefore closing the loop from insights to action in the learning and teaching space. Pablo also maintains an active research profile and is editor in chief of the Journal for Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, one of the world’s top 3 marine biology journals.

(PI: UTS Lead): Dr Simon Knight is a Lecturer at UTS Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, formerly at the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (2015-17). His research focuses on the relationship of analytics to epistemology, pedagogy and assessment, discourse analytics, and epistemic cognition, particularly around information seeking. He is active in the Learning Analytics and Learning Sciences communities, co-chairing the ICLS14 Workshop on Learning Analytics for Learning and Becoming in Practice, LAK15 Workshop on Temporal Analyses of Learning Data, and LAK16 Workshop on Critical Perspectives in Writing Analytics.