Advancements in Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) have the potential to enhance the development of effective teamwork skills and foster reflection on collaboration dynamics in physical learning environments. Yet, only a few MMLA studies have closed the learning analytics loop by making MMLA solutions immediately accessible to educators to support reflective practices, especially in authentic settings. Moreover, deploying MMLA solutions in authentic settings can bring new challenges beyond logistic and privacy issues. This paper reports the design and use of TeamSlides, a multimodal teamwork analytics dashboard to support teacher-guided reflection. We conducted an in-the-wild classroom study involving 11 teachers and 138 students. Multimodal data were collected from students working in team healthcare simulations. We examined how teachers used the dashboard in 22 debrief sessions to aid their reflective practices. We also interviewed teachers to discuss their perceptions of the dashboard’s value and the challenges faced during its use. Our results suggest that the dashboard effectively reinforced discussions and augmented teacher-guided reflection practices. However, teachers encountered interpretation conflicts, sometimes leading to mistrust or misrepresenting the information. We discuss the considerations needed to overcome these challenges in MMLA research.

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) innovations make use of rapidly evolving sensing and artificial intelligence algorithms to collect rich data about learning activities that unfold in physical spaces. The analysis of these data is opening exciting new avenues for both studying and supporting learning. Yet, practical and logistical challenges commonly appear while deploying MMLA innovations “in-the-wild”. These can span from technical issues related to enhancing the learning space with sensing capabilities, to the increased complexity of teachers’ tasks. These practicalities have been rarely investigated. This article addresses this gap by presenting a set of lessons learnt from a 2-year human-centred MMLA in-the-wild study conducted with 399 students and 17 educators in the context of nursing education. The lessons learnt were synthesised into topics related to (i) technological/physical aspects of the deployment; (ii) multimodal data and interfaces; (iii) the design process; (iv) participation, ethics and privacy; and (v) sustainability of the deployment.

Embodied team learning is a form of group learning that occurs in co-located settings where students need to interact with others while actively using resources in the physical learning space to achieve a common goal. In such situations, communication dynamics can be complex as team discourse segments can happen in parallel at different locations of the physical space with varied team member configurations. This can make it hard for teachers to assess the effectiveness of teamwork and for students to reflect on their own experiences. To address this problem, we propose METS (Multimodal Embodied Teamwork Signature), a method to model team dialogue content in combination with spatial and temporal data to generate a signature of embodied teamwork. We present a study in the context of a highly dynamic healthcare team simulation space where students can freely move. We illustrate how signatures of embodied teamwork can help to identify key differences between high and low performing teams: i) across the whole learning session; ii) at different phases of learning sessions; and iii) at particular spaces of interest in the learning space.

In co-located situations, team members use a combination of verbal and visual signals to communicate effectively, among which positional forms play a key role. The spatial patterns adopted by team members in terms of where in the physical space they are standing, and who their body is oriented to, can be key in analysing and increasing the quality of interaction during such face-to-face situations. In this paper, we model the students’ communication based on spatial (positioning) and audio (voice detection) data captured from 92 students working in teams of four in the context of healthcare simulation. We extract non-verbal events (i.e., total speaking time, overlapped speech,and speech responses to team members and teachers) and investigate to what extent they can serve as meaningful indicators of students’ performance according to teachers’ learning intentions. The contribution of this paper to multimodal learning analytics includes: i) a generic method to semi-automatically model communication in a setting where students can freely move in the learning space; and ii) results from a mixed-methods analysis of non-verbal indicators of team communication with respect to teachers’ learning design.