Accepted Workshops

Is Educational Research a Matter of Digital Observations and Data Balancing?

Presenters: Shawn Fraser, David Boulanger, Vive Kumar, Athabasca University, Canada

Abstract: This workshop lays the foundation for observational research by proposing to delve into the topics of data balancing and assumptions underlying causality. More specifically, this workshop thoroughly demonstrates three matching techniques and their corresponding imbalance metrics to minimize and measure data imbalance: Coarsened Exact Matching/𝐿1, Mahalanobis Distance Matching/Average Mahalanobis Imbalance, and Propensity Score Matching/Difference in Means. This workshop provides interactive and collaborative programming and analysis tasks. In particular, a Web application dashboard is made available to assess the level of data imbalance in two closely related randomized and observational datasets. This workshop gives insights on the potential of observational studies as learning analytics matures and research on machine learning problems like matching, dimensionality reduction, and optimization progresses.

 

2nd International Workshop on Technologies Assisting Teaching and Administration (TATA 2018)

Workshop Organizer: Maiga Chang, Athabasca University, Canada

Abstract: TATA is an interactive/tutorial like workshop. The workshop aims to introduce technologies that assist parents, teachers and schools (instead of students) and has significant time for giving participants to get their hands on trying the technologies, discussing with researchers and giving researchers their feedback. All accepted workshop papers need to have their technologies (e.g., systems and tools) ready and open for participants trying in the workshop.

The workshop will have accepted workshop papers’ researchers to share and demo their technologies and have three sessions. In the first session, researchers of each accepted workshop paper will introduce the technologies from practical point of views (instead of talking theories, maths, and detailed methods) for 10 to 15 minutes. Then, the workshop gives participants 20 to 25 minutes to really try on the proposed systems and tools. At the end, researchers can further interact with participants in the 10 to 15 minutes discussion section so the participants can share their perceptions, comments, suggestions, and even intention of using the proposed systems and tools with researchers.

All accepted workshop papers will be invited to submit to International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-distance-education-technologies/1078) indexed by Elsevier Engineering Index and Web of Science’s ESCI an extended version of the paper that includes necessary theoretical content and the results and findings coming from the collected data with qualitative or quantitative data analysis method.

The workshop will be a platform that provides the following benefits for both researchers who present their systems/tools at the workshop and participants who attend the workshop:

  1. researchers can take this workshop as an Open House event to announce and introduce their latest research outcome for the public;
  2. participants can clear understand the proposed systems/tools easier since the presentations have no complicated maths/equations and unfamiliar theoretical methods/models;
  3. researchers have time to live demonstrate their systems/tools;
  4. participants can put their hands on the introduced systems/tools instead of just listening speeches and see the proposed technologies behind glasses;
  5. participants can get immediately and direct helps from researchers when they have questions and encounter difficulties while using the introduced systems/tools;
  6. researchers can get users’ perceptions, comments, suggestions, and feedback during the workshop;
  7. researchers can further analyze the collected feedback to either make their works better and write follow-up papers for the results;
  8. researchers can reach potential collaborators who want to use their systems/tools as well as conduct pilots with the researchers together in the near future.

The researchers are encouraged to submit a maximum 6 pages long workshop paper to maiga.chang@gmail.com by November 15, 2017. Submitted workshop papers should NOT talk theories, maths (including symbols and equations), and details like algorithms. Instead, the main body of the paper should be focusing on the proposed technologies (i.e., systems and tools) as well as having real use cases and running examples to explain its workflow, importance, features and limitations. The workshop paper should be prepared and well-written under Springer’s format. The template can be found at http://iasle.net/icsle2018/general-information/author-guidelines/, for gathering all workshop papers.

Past accepted TATA Workshop papers can be seen from the below urls and they are good examples to tell what should be focused on your manuscript submitted to TATA Workshop:

 Submission Topics (not limited to as long as the technologies are smart and can be used to assist parents, teachers, and administrative and managerial personnel): academic analytics, affective computing, assessment, behaviour pattern analysis and extraction, big data, cloud-based systems, data mining, games, grouping strategies, intelligent agents, learning analytics, mobile apps, MOOCs, multi-agent systems, ontologies, predictive systems, recommenders, self-regulated learning, semantic analysis, social networks, virtual worlds, web 2.0.

Page Limitation: 6 pages long in Springer’s format.

Paper Template: http://iasle.net/icsle2018/general-information/author-guidelines/

Important Dates:

  • Submission Date (email to maiga.chang@gmail.com with subject “TATA Workshop submission”): November 15, 2017
  • Notification Date: December 1, 2017
  • Camera-Ready Papers: December 15, 2017
  • Author registration: December 15, 2017