Without any prior notice, I have once again been honored with such a prestigious award. Thank you very much. The results of our research on educational big data, supported by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), received the Best Paper Award for Short Paper at the International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2015)!
Since it was a short paper, I didn’t expect there to be an award, so I was caught completely off guard. When the moderator called out the title, they said “self-regulated learning,” so I was talking to Professor Ogata, who manages this research project, saying, “Someone else is doing research similar to ours,” when Professor Ogata said, “Wait? My name is on it. Oh, it’s yours, Yamada-san!” I was quite surprised. Since there was no prior announcement, I didn’t know how to react and just stood there in front of everyone feeling flustered… how embarrassing.
The content of the paper involves a correlation analysis between logs from the eBook reader “BookLooper”—specifically the number of slides viewed for more than 5 seconds, the number of markers used, and the number of annotations—and the MSLQ (Pintrich and DeGroot, 1990), a scale for Self-Regulated Learning. Since the study was conducted on a class of about 30 students, we couldn’t perform advanced analysis; it was a very simple study intended to identify promising variables and potential analytical methods for future research. I never imagined it would receive an award. I am deeply grateful to the reviewers, the project members, and my co-authors for making this award possible. As this project is primarily driven by researchers in the field of informatics, it is difficult for a researcher like me, who specializes in Educational Technology and evaluates using psychological data, to find my place, and I have often worried about what I can contribute here. However, because this research, which aims to demonstrate a connection to Self-Regulated Learning—a very important theory in educational psychology—was recognized at an IEEE international conference in the field of informatics, I feel that the significance of my work has been acknowledged, even if the study was limited. Thank you. I feel that I can contribute to the development of learning support and applications/functions based on Learning Analytics as we move forward with this project.
I hope to continue contributing to the learning support based on educational data analysis that this project aims for. Thank you very much.
Related Information
Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun: Toward the Utilization of Educational Big Data – Kyushu University and others introduce digital teaching materials for 2,700 students
http://www.nikkan.co.jp/news/nkx0720150521eaah.html
Current Awareness: Kyushu University begins research on the utilization of educational big data by distributing lecture materials to all first-year students using the eBook distribution service “BookLooper” from Kyocera Maruzen System Integration
http://current.ndl.go.jp/node/28448
Awarded Paper
Yamada, M., Yin, C., Shimada, A., Kojima, K., Okubo, F., and Ogata, H. (2015). Preliminary Research on Self-regulated Learning and Learning Logs in a Ubiquitous Learning Environment, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies(ICALT 2015), 93-95
