ECTEL 2022 Best Paper awarded to Esteban VILLALOBOS

The 17th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL) was held from 12 to 16 September in Toulouse. Esteban Villalobos, from the TALENT teamICI department, received the Best Paper award for his work entitled “Supporting Self-regulating Learning in BL: Exploring learners’ tactics and strategies” and co-authored with Mar Pérez-Sanagustin, Cédric Sanza, André Tricot and Julien Broisin. 

Abstract : In the past years, Blended Learning (BL) has gained traction as a methodology in Higher Education Institutions. Despite the positive effects of BL, several studies have shown that students require high levels of self-regulation to succeed in these types of practices. Still, there is little understanding of how students organize their learning in BL authentic contexts. To fill this gap, this paper presents an exploratory study to analyze the learning tactics and strategies of 119 students in a BL course using the Moodle Learning Management System. Specifically, we examined the effects on students’ learning behavior before and after an intervention with a dashboard-based plug-in designed to support self-regulated learning (SRL). Using a data-driven approach based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM), we identified the tactics and strategies employed by the students along the course. The results show that students’ tactics and strategies changed significantly depending on the course design and the context in which learning occurs (in or beyond the class). Also, we found evidence indicating that the main factor that correlates to the students’ learning strategies is their previous knowledge and the students’ SRL ability profile.