Research for higher education of the future

Deutsch

Students cannot simply be pigeonholed into a single category. Rather, they are a heterogeneous group of people characterized by diversity. Artificial intelligence and adaptive technologies offer us opportunities to respond precisely to learners’ needs.

Our specialists consider the many aspects of studying and teaching from three distinct perspectives:

• Given that linguistic interactions are pervasive in digital teaching and learning contexts, how can we leverage AI and language technology to enhance learning and teaching?
• Data from digital courses provides information about learning behavior and offers the opportunity for tailored support. What can we do to optimize learning processes and how can automated feedback support self-regulation, understanding, and self-assessment?
• What are the characteristics of learners at the individual and group levels, and what kind of forms might interventions – during module courses and (online) examinations – take?

Vision and Goals

CATALPA’s research is focused on utilizing AI in a targeted, resource-efficient, secure, and pedagogically meaningful manner to ensure empirically verifiable improvements in learning outcomes among the diverse student community, thus ultimately leading to greater educational equity. The key questions are: What can be done to actually improve studying? What effect do new AI methods have on teaching and learning? How can we use the insights gained from learning analytics to enhance learning processes?

Our researchers explore these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, thereby enhancing their expertise in learning processes and individual learning behaviors, enabling them to provide practical recommendations.

Research for and in Practice

With a pool of nearly 70,000 students from diverse age groups, backgrounds, and educational experiences engaged in hybrid distance learning methods, there are few, if any, educational institutions better suited than the FernUniversität in Hagen for investigations into how digital systems can optimally support learning and teaching. In a kind of living laboratory, CATALPA is able to derive practical insights that can be fed directly back into practice. Close collaboration with the faculties and their students is important here.

Data Security and Trusted Learning Analytics

CATALPA gains knowledge directly from working practice. This means its researchers work with large amounts of data gathered from the sensitive domain of learning. The research center must therefore be especially vigilant in ensuring the responsible handling of this data. Data protection officers at the FernUniversität in Hagen play an integral role in all projects involving field studies and ensure strict adherence to compliance standards. The ethics committee is also always involved from the start of any study.

In the various CATALPA projects, the researchers themselves also continuously critically reassess the manner in which data handling is conducted. For example, in research projects involving external cooperation partners, the issue of data protection is regularly discussed at roundtables involving all the data protection officers from the partner institutions. One CATALPA project involved the development of a pseudonymization concept for the entire FernUni. This was then implemented and used to link various databases such as Moodle, ECTS, and panel data. The insights gathered from this CATALPA project have been fed into a university-wide initiative, which serves as a model for pseudonymization in ongoing and future projects.