Learning Analytics for Natural User Interfaces: A Framework, Case Studies and a Maturity Analysis

Abstract

The continuous advancement of Natural User Interfaces is allowing the development of novel and creative ways to support collocated collaborative work in a wide range of areas, including teaching and learning. In terms of Learning Analytics (LA), the use of interactive surfaces and Tangible User Interfaces can offer unique opportunities for automatically capturing digital traces of students’ multimodal interactions and can also can facilitate multi-user exploration of students’ data. This paper analyses current research and development exploring learning analytics associated with the use of interactive surface and tangible devices. We propose a framework to analyse our first-hand experiences, and the small number of related deployments according to five dimensions: the orchestration activities involved; the phases of the pedagogical practice that are supported; the target actors; the iteration of the LA process and the levels of impact of the LA deployment. The contributions of the paper are: a framework that can be used for characterising the design space of similar sub-areas of learning analytics; and 2) a synthesis of conclusions derived from our analysis that identify the degree of maturity, the current challenges and the pedagogical opportunities offered by the existing applications of learning analytics and interactive surfaces and tangibles.