Projects
Funded Research Projects
User-Centred Social Media | Graduiertenkolleg
DFG Project
Project Duration: October 2015 - March 2020
The DFG-funded Research Training Group (Graduate School) “User-Centred Social Media (UCSM)” aims at developing new models and methods for analyzing, designing and evaluating social media from a user perspective. The main research fields in the RTG are modelling and understanding user behavior, social media engineering, and social media analytics. The Interdisciplinary RTG brings together researchers from computer science and psychology at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Open Source Projects
Open Learning Analytics Platform - OpenLAP
The Open Learning Analytics Platform (OpenLAP) provides a detailed technical open learning analytics (OLA) architecture with a concrete implementation of all its components, seamlessly integrated in a platform. It encompasses different stakeholders associated through a common interest in learning analytics but with diverse needs and objectives, a wide range of data coming from various learning environments and contexts, as well as multiple infrastructures and methods that enable to draw value from data in order to gain insight into learning processes.
OpenLAP follows a user-centric approach to engage end users in flexible definition and dynamic generation of indicators. To meet the requirements of diverse users, OpenLAP provides a modular and extensible architecture that allows the easy integration of new analytics modules, analytics methods, and visualization techniques.
CourseMapper
CourseMapper is a mind map-based collaborative course annotation and analytics platform that fosters collaboration and interaction around pdf/video learning materials, supported by visual learning analytics. CourseMapper follows a learner-centered and networked learning approach, driven by the Learning as a Network (LaaN) theory.
Learners can use CourseMapper to collaboratively organize learning materials as a mind-map, share related learning resources, collaboratively discuss and annotate pdf and video learning materials. Further, CourseMapper provides different statistical and visual analytics widgets (e.g heatmaps and annotation maps) to support monitoring, awareness, self-reflection, motivation, feedback, and recommendation.
Personal Academic Learner Model - PALM
The PALM toolkit aims at supporting awareness, reflection, and recommendation in academic networks. PALM builds a user model based on researcher, publication, and conference data collected from various sources. It uses topic modeling and keyword extraction techniques to detect user's interests, leverages visual analytics methods to help users find insights into the publication data, and applies interest-based visual interactive recommendation algorithms to achieve transparency and user control.