In this paper we discuss the changing role of citizen science in research, teaching, and learning. This change is being brought about by the development of a wider perspective on the potential purposes of participation in citizen science both for scientists and for members of the public. In this paper we review frameworks for participation, discuss benefits of participation and consider whether we can use new models of citizen science to democratise research. Citizen science is best understood as a democratic endeavour. The more opportunities for learning, the more people benefit, the more challenging the task for educators, the more varied the media and tools developed to support this purpose. Educators have extended the range of opportunities for learning to include not just formal settings, but informal ones. This position paper discusses the development of tools to support the connections between formal and informal learning settings and in particular the potential of tools to support citizen science, as a vehicle for learning both about science and about the conduct of research.

Volunteers in citizen science projects contribute their labour to the activities of science, becoming involved in the advancement of science. With the advent of digital technologies, the involvement of non-scientists in scientific projects has mushroomed (see Curtis et al., 2018). However, the nature of the participation in citizen science has been limited in a variety of ways. We have adopted the term citizen inquiry to describe our approach. Our interest in inquiry learning was developed in the Personal Inquiry project (see Sharples et al., 2015) which developed an approach to supporting inquiries of personal relevance in science learning. We developed software to support pupils, our first iteration of the nQuire platform. Further projects explored ways in which such software could be of use in encouraging participation in citizen science inquiry. We designed the later iterations of the nQuire platform (nquire.org.uk) as a citizen science and inquiry learning tool, that can support any individual or organisation (with or without research background) to set up and manage their own scientific investigations. We report here on the impact of this work over a fifteen-year period. We discuss the ways in which this software has allowed enhanced participation in citizen projects and the potential development of this approach for democratising citizen science.

Predictive learning analytics (PLA) dashboards have been used by teachers to identify students at risk of failing their studies and provide proactive support. Yet, very few of them have been deployed at a large scale or had their use studied at a mature level of implementation. In this study, we surveyed 366 distance learning university teachers across four faculties three years after PLA has been made available across university as business as usual. Informed by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), we present a context-specific version of UTAUT that reflects teachers’ perceptions of PLA in distance learning higher education. The adoption and use of PLA was shown to be positively influenced by less experience in teaching, performance expectancy, self-efficacy, positive attitudes, and low anxiety, while negatively influenced by a lack of facilitating conditions and low effort expectancy, indicating that the type of technology and context within which it is used are significant factors determining our understanding of technology usage and adoption. This study provides significant insights as to how to design, apply and implement PLA with teachers in higher education.

This Research, Full Paper presents a study that sheds some light on the gender related disparities that women face in engineering academia. STEM has always been a male dominated field with, for example, less than ten percent women in electrical engineering jobs, a figure that continues in academia, but dwindles when it comes to senior academic positions at universities. Though studies have uncovered that such disparities exist in academia, little is known about difficulties that female engineering university teachers face in low- and middle-income countries in South Asia. In this study, twenty-five female (N=25) and eighteen male (N=18) university teachers from the electrical engineering and computer science departments of three different universities in Pakistan were interviewed, using a semi-structured interview methodology. The interviewees had between one and twenty five years of teaching experience, holding junior teaching positions, all the way to Professor. Interview questions were mainly related to job responsibilities, tasks assigned, authorities given to them and comparisons to male colleagues. Data collected was analyzed using phenomenological research techniques, with different meaning units listed and then clustered into seven common themes. Challenges related to gender disparity in academia were mainly reported by female participants. Only five of the women in this study had persevered despite challenges and had either improved or were in the process of improving their qualification. These were also the women that seemed more driven and claimed to have had more support from their family, home and from the workplace. The rest of the women were somewhat uncertain about their professional progress and preferred to remain in their ‘comfort zone’ i.e. at a lower rank and lesser salary. The importance of this study is in the fact that it highlights the problems that female academics face in a region of the world where such studies are few and far between. Though women university teachers in Asia and the Middle East could relate more to these problems, the insights gained from this study could benefit women in this profession in any part of the world.

We outline the features of an initiative to improve the inclusivity and transparency of research by using methods utilized by the citizen science community to develop participation in research projects by members of the public. Our aim is to transform the prevalent approach to public participation in such projects from the limited roles of data provider or data analyst and extending roles to that of co-researcher or stakeholder. We describe our approach to citizen science inquiry and discuss how it forms the basis of our intention and plan to advance the democratization of research. A pilot project of the approach is described. Challenges in the approach are outlined.

Existing recommendations about how to select or design mobile applications (apps) for learning have been heavily relied on customer and teacher reviews, designer descriptions, and educational theories. There is a lack of evaluation frameworks that are informed by research evidence of how different children interact and use apps. The first version of an evidence-based framework, coined as MAD learn, is presented detailing affordances that hinder or help children's learning, as emerged from relevant studies. To encourage further studies in the field, not only by researchers but also designers and practitioners, a methodological approach to iteratively assess the affordances of mobile apps is also introduced. This is based on (a) visualising the learning design and learning components of a given app and (b) analysing the screen and audio recordings of children's interactions with apps. The proposed approach has been tested with 17 children 5-6 years old who interacted with a maths app. The analysis captured patterns of actual usage, including time spent on different activities, completion rates, communication instances, and number and type of mistakes. Insights revealed that certain design affordances, including instructions, feedback, and help-on-demand, were differently perceived by children, in some cases helping to learn while, in others, hindering it.

This article aims to provide an account of the use of reflexive photography in capturing player creativity in practice and present a guide to how game design can support player creativity. While previous literature has examined some aspects of player creativity in digital games, there remains a dearth of work, which examines how design elements of games contribute to creative behavior. Using a reflexive photography method with photo-elicitation interviews, this study identifies eight design affordances for player creativity in digital games and outlines the effectiveness of the reflexive photography method within the context of digital games. The identified design affordances related to the degree of flexibility of the game structure (e.g., open versus linear), narrative exploration, extent and diversity of game variables, opportunities for content creation, environmental interaction and exploration, avatar customization, progression, and replayability. Implications for the design of games that support creativity are discussed.

This paper reviews the current developments in the use of nQuire (www.nquire.org.uk), an Open University platform supporting engagement of members of the public in large-scale interactive surveys and science investigations. The platform is designed to continue a series of mass online science investigations from BBC Lab UK linked to broadcast TV and radio programmes, alongside the citizen-led inquiries. This paper reports on progress with the development of the platform and its use in a variety of contexts

This paper addresses the related issues of which pedagogies improve with scale and how to develop a novel platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper begins by introducing pedagogy-informed design of platforms for learning at scale. It then summarizes previous work to develop a platform for open science investigations. Then, it introduces a new platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the effectiveness of the platform to: meet its design requirements; enable individuals, groups and institutions to design inquiry-led investigations; engage members of the public to participate; and enable learning activities on the platform to sustain and grow.

In this paper, we describe a large-scale study about the use of predictive learning analytics data with 240 teachers in 10 modules at a distance learning higher education institution. The aim of the study was to illuminate teachers' uses and practices of predictive data, in particular identify how predictive data was used to support students at risk of not completing or failing a module. Data were collected from statistical analysis of 17,033 students' performance by the end of the intervention, teacher usage statistics, and five individual semi-structured interviews with teachers. Findings revealed that teachers endorse the use of predictive data to support their practice yet in diverse ways and raised the need for devising appropriate intervention strategies to support students at risk.

This study provides a conceptual framework how organizations may adopt evidence-based interventions at scale, and how institutions may evaluate the costs and benefits of such interventions. Building on a new conceptual model developed by the Open University UK (OU), we will analyse three case-studies of evidence-based interventions. By working with 90+ large-scale modules for a period of two years across the five faculties and disciplines within the OU, Analytics4Action provides a bottom-up-approach for working together with key stakeholders within their respective contexts. Using principles of embedded case-study approaches by Yin [1], by comparing the learning behavior, satisfaction and performance of 11079 learners the findings indicated that each of the three learning designs led to satisfied students and average to good student retention. In the second part we highlighted that the three module teams made in-presentation interventions based upon real-time analytics, whereby initial user data indicated VLE behaviour in line with expectations. In 2-5 years, we hope that a rich, robust evidence-base will be presented to show how learning analytics can help teachers to make informed, timely and successful interventions that will help learners to achieve their learning outcomes.

Game appropriation is currently not well conceptualized. What literature does exists (CitationGriffiths & Light, 2008; CitationLowood, 2005; CitationPostigo, 2008; CitationStalker, 2005) uses the term primarily to denote gamers' practices beyond the designers' original intentions, for instance, game content modifications. This article frames game appropriation in a different manner; unlike existing appropriation models, game appropriation is conceptualized as a motivational process underpinned by three primary factors: game design characteristics, social interaction, and the psychological characteristics of the gamer. The main contribution of this article is the development of the first model of game appropriation, the game appropriation model (GAM). GAM explains the process of digital games' incorporation into gamers' daily practices as well as the nature of their gameplay. Game appropriation recognizes the online–offline continuity; it contributes to understating gameplay as a long-term, dynamic activity, directly interrelated with a gamers' everyday life rather than a set of defined moments of participation.