This paper reports on the co-design of data comics for participants in clinical research trials and reflects on the specific challenges encountered when working in this design space. The data comics aimed to aid the communication of medical test results collected during the trial to individual study participants in a simple and understandable way. However, navigating the complexities, uncertainties and constraints associated with the clinical trial environment required adaptation to the co-design process. Over 14 months we co-designed a set of comics, overcoming a unique combination of challenges associated with designing in the context of a clinical research trial, such as strict ethical and legal frameworks, complex data and ongoing uncertainty. Reflecting upon the process, we identify several recurring challenges. Based on these challenges we give guidance on negotiating the constrained and uncertain design space of a clinical trial, with design method considerations that apply beyond this domain.

This paper reports how clinicians explain personal health data to patients and the tensions which arise from this in practice, leading us to describe a set of implications for designing communication aids around personal health data. With the trend towards patient-centered care and shared decision making, it is crucial that patients understand their clinical data and respective implications during medical consultations. So, what strategies do clinicians currently use to ensure this? And how can these inform the development of successful patient communication aids? Through interviewing 19 healthcare professionals, we identify 57 techniques, painting a rich picture of current practices. However, we also note 9 tensions that arise when applying these techniques in reality; such as balancing transparency with disclosing data inappropriate for a patient’s current situation. Based on the techniques and motivated by these tensions, we present a set of considerations to inform the design of technological patient communication aids consistent with current clinical practice.

Learning Analytics has drawn the attention of higher education institutions in recent years as a promising approach to improving learning and teaching. Even though students are key stakeholders for Learning Analytics, there is a lack of student perspectives in institutional decision-making and the body of research shedding light on student views is limited. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring student perspectives on Learning Analytics through interviews and focus groups with 18 student participants from a university in Scotland. Key findings include a general lack of awareness of the term ‘learning analytics', a desire for customisation and anonymity, and a positive attitude towards dashboards. A number of dashboard design mock-ups were co-designed with student participants, incorporating several of their expectations from Learning Analytics.

We are experiencing a health literacy crisis worldwide, which has alarming effects on individuals' medical outcomes.This poses the challenge of communicating key information about health conditions and their management in a way that is easily understood by a general audience.In this paper, we propose the use of data-driven storytelling to address this challenge, in particular through interactive data comics.We developed an interactive data comic that communicates cancer data.A between-group study with 98 participants was carried out to evaluate the data comic's ease of understanding and engagement, compared to a text medium that captures the same information.The study reveals that the data comic is perceived to be more engaging, and participants have greater recall and understanding of the data within the story, compared with the text medium.

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education. Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper-educators and researchers in data visualization-identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes People, Goals & Assessment, Environment, Motivation, Methods, Materials, and Change. Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items: embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION, build COMMUNITIES, conduct RESEARCH, act AGILE, and relish RESPONSIBILITY. We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world: viseducationchallenges.github.io.

Intrahospital transfers are a common but hazardous aspect of hospital care, with a large number of incidents posing a threat to patient safety. A growing body of work advocates the use of checklists for minimizing intrahospital transfer risk, but the majority of existing checklists are not guaranteed to be error-free and are difficult to adapt to different clinical settings or changing hospital policies. This paper details an approach that addresses these challenges through the employment of workflow technologies and formal methods for generating structured checklists. A three-phased methodology is proposed, where intrahospital transfer processes are first conceptualized, then rigorously composed into workflows that are mechanically verified, and finally, translated into a set of checklists that support hospital staff while maintaining the dependencies between different transfer tasks. A case study is presented, highlighting the feasibility of this approach, and the correctness and maintainability benefits brought by the logical underpinning of this methodology. A checklist evaluation is discussed, with promising results regarding their usefulness.

Critical thinking and problem solving are fundamental skills to function successfully particularly in today's world. When programming, these skills are promoted, developed and deployed. In this context, Universidad ORT Uruguay and The University of Edinburgh co-created in 2015 a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that teaches young teenagers how to program. The course was implemented simultaneously in 2 versions: in Spanish, called “¡A Programar!” and in English, called “Code Yourself!”, which are available on the Coursera platform. Since its launch in March 2015, more than 139,000 people from 197 countries have registered. Initially it was offered in a “fixed session”; while currently it is offered in an “auto-cohort” mode. In both cases, students' surveys indicate that the course has met or exceeded expectations (values above 93%). In this paper, we detail the characteristics of the MOOC, and we analyze and compare the modes and results.

In a technology-fueled world, coding is an essential skill for young people. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are free online courses available to a very large number of people, are an effective and increasingly popular option for teaching scientific topics to a worldwide audience. However, despite the large number of MOOCs available on computer science, there is a scarcity of coding-related MOOCs that are designed for children and teenagers. In this paper, we present a programming MOOC that was recently developed by The University of Edinburgh and Universidad ORT Uruguay for teenager high school students with no prior programming experience. The MOOC was collaboratively developed by the two teams, resulting in a shared instructional design but with a bilingual delivery: “Code Yourself” in English and “A Programar” in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the course design for a young audience and we discuss the international co-development of the course materials. Furthermore, we present results from its simultaneous bilingual delivery in spring 2015, where around 85000 students participated. Student surveys show encouraging results: more than 93% found that the course met or exceeded their expectations, and more than 90% stated that they plan to continue programming in the future.

As the field of learning analytics continues to mature, there is a corresponding evolution and sophistication of the associated analytical methods and techniques. In this regard social network analysis (SNA) has emerged as one of the cornerstones of learning analytics methodologies. However, despite the noted importance of social networks for facilitating the learning process, it remains unclear how and to what extent such network measures are associated with specific learning outcomes. Motivated by Simmel's theory of social interactions and building on the argument that social centrality does not always imply benefits, this study aimed to further contribute to the understanding of the association between students' social centrality and their academic performance. The study reveals that learning analytics research drawing on SNA should incorporate both - descriptive and statistical methods to provide a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of a students' network position. In so doing researchers can undertake more nuanced and contextually salient inferences about learning in network settings. Specifically, we show how differences in the factors framing students' interactions within two instances of a MOOC affect the association between the three social network centrality measures (i.e., degree, closeness, and betweenness) and the final course outcome.

We review a generic framework for rigorous workflow modelling and verification that was recently applied to healthcare collaboration patterns, and we show how it can be utilised to help both medical staff and health informaticians build a systematic understanding of informal practices followed during intra-hospital patient transfers. A case study is discussed, demonstrating how the logical foundations of our approach help capture and enforce significant aspects of intra-hospital transfers that are pertinent to their improvement.

In a complex business world, characterised by globalisation and rapid rhythms of change, understanding supply chain (SC) operation dynamics is crucial. This paper describes a logic-based approach to analysing SC operation dynamics, named SCOlog. SC operation is modelled in a declarative fashion and it is simulated following rule-based execution semantics. This approach facilitates the automated explanation of simulated SC operational behaviours and performance. The automated explanation support provided by SCOlog is found to improve the understanding of the domain for non-SCM experts. Furthermore, SCOlog allows for maintainability and reusability.