I am seeking students doing Honours or a minor thesis in a Masters interested in working on designing Learning Analytics innovations to study classroom proxemics by analysing and visualising indoor positioning data (along with other sources of data such as audio, physiological activity and characteristics of the students).

This project aims to develop methods for supporting teachers in reflecting on their positioning strategies in the classroom by making key activity traces visible. This project is fundamentally about bridging the gap between substantial work on classroom proxemics (the study about how people use the physical space), based on qualitative observations; and the dearth of methods to provide feedback to teachers on their teaching practice using evidence, at a scale. This project is strategic because it aims to transform ephemeral teaching classroom activity, that currently is largely opaque to computational analysis, into a transparent phenomenon from which selected features can be captured and rendered visible for the purposes of professional development for teachers. 

The project may involve both the analysis of a dataset already captured or the capture of new positioning data or qualitative data from educational stakeholders.

Example publication related to this opportunity: Martinez-Maldonado, R. (2019) “I Spent More Time with that Team”: Making Spatial Pedagogy Visible Using Positioning Sensors. International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, LAK 2019.