Research

I am an educational technology researcher with a background in computer science and language learning. The majority of the educational technology that I have explored has been related to language learning, but some of the projects that I have worked on have been more general purpose. Regardless of the pedagogical philosophy or domain associated with the technology that I have developed or evaluated, my work has always had the end goal of helping learners acquire knowledge or skills.

General Purpose Educational Technology Development and Evaluation Projects

iHelp Discussions and Pragmatics Project: iHelp Discussions was a discussion forum that was used by students of all levels within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. We are analyzing the language used within iHelp Discussions in an attempt to find patterns in language use and determine how these patterns change over time. More specifically, we are looking to see if students adopt the language of their community of practice. We are also investigating how power structures within the academic setting affect the formality and other linguistic features of student posts within this forum.

Project Lead: Carrie Demmans Epp

Collaborators:

Christopher Brooks
- Greg Logan
- Jennifer Seaton
Gord McCalla

Recollect: Recollect is a video lecture recording and playback system. It was used to support many University of Saskatchewan undergraduate courses across a variety of disciplines. The courses that used Recollect were primarily conducted as traditional lectures. However, some of the courses used a blended-learning approach to course delivery.

I performed the qualitative evaluation of open-ended survey responses from over 1000 students who had used Recollect.

This work led to the development of models of system usage. Chris continued this work and identified the relationships between system usage patterns and learning outcomes. We are now expanding this work to look at the usage patterns of English-language learners.

Project Leads: Christopher Brooks (University of Michigan) and Carrie Demmans Epp

Collaborators:

Jim Greer (ARIES Laboratory, U of Saskatchewan)
Greg Logan

Publications:

[C1] Christopher Brooks*, Carrie Demmans Epp, Greg Logan*, Jim Greer. (2011) The Who, What, When, Where, and Why of Lecture Capture. Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada 86-92

iHelp Courses Project: iHelp Courses is a learning content management system that was developed by the Department ofComputer Science and ARIES laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan. It was used to deliver materials for online and blended courses within the Department of Computer Science.

My involvement with this project included course content development and organization (content packaging and learning object preparation), as well as the analysis of learner behavior based on the logs of their interactions with the system.

Project Leads: Monisha Shukla and Jim Greer (ARIES Laboratory, U of Sask.)

MyVoice: MyVoice is a location-aware communication support tool that runs on mobile phones. We studied its use within special education contexts to see if it could better support student learning activities..

I was responsible for duties surrounding the automated logging of student activities within the application. I was also responsible for the processing and later analyses of this log information. Moving forward, we plan to build models of the learner’s language use and test them against assessments of the learner’s communication skills to see if their actions within MyVoice correlate to their communicative abilities.

Project Leads: Rachelle Campigotto and Rhonda McEwen

Collaborators:

Publications:

[J5]Carrie Demmans Epp, Rhonda McEwen, Rachelle Campigotto, Karyn Moffatt. (2015). Information Practices and User Interfaces: Student Use of an iOS Application in Special Education. Education and Information Technologies. Online First.

[J1] Rachelle Campigotto, Rhonda McEwen, Carrie Demmans Epp. (2013) Especially Social: Exploring the Use of an iOS Application in Special Needs Classrooms. Computers & Education, 60(1), 74-86.

[c2] Carrie Demmans Epp^*, Rachelle Campigotto, Alexander Levy, Ron Baecker. (2011). MarcoPolo: Context-Sensitive Mobile Communication Support. In Proceedings of FICCDAT: RESNA/ICTA, 2011, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (4 pages)

Selecting Oral Assessment Tasks for the University Undergraduate Classroom: This project involved the development of a taxonomy and program that can be used to help undergraduate instructors select appropriate oral assessment tasks for their classrooms. The tool takes an instructor’s institutional context, teaching practices, and assessment goals into account and recommends the types of oral assessment tasks that are most appropriate to that instructor’s situation. The tool also makes

suggestions that could improve the usefulness and fairness of different types of oral assessment tasks. Beyond this, it asks several questions that are intended to encourage reflection and help the instructor with his/her course planning.

I helped develop the taxonomy and programmed the application.

Project Leads: Carrie Demmans Epp, Gina Park, and Christopher Plumb

Products:

.NET Application and the accompanying course paper (includes the taxonomy).

Publications:

[J3] Carrie Demmans Epp, Gina Park, Christopher Plumb. (2015). Developing an adaptive tool to select, plan, and scaffold oral assessment tasks for undergraduate courses. Educational Technology Review & Development (ETRD). 63(3), 475-498.

PeppeR: PeppeR is an online learning environment that provides collaborative work spaces to support student activities and learning. The PeppeR system visually resembles a discussion forum but it has many features that specifically aim to support knowledge building.

I led the heuristic evaluation of the graphical user interface with the aim of improving the system's usability. I also helped doctoral students with their quantitative analysis of usage logs and questionnaire responses.

Project Leads: Jim Hewitt and Clare Brett

Collaborators:

Publications:

[J6] Krystle Phirangee, Carrie Demmans Epp, Jim Hewitt. (in press). Exploring the relationships between facilitation methods, students’ sense of community and their online behaviours. Online Learning Journal, special issue on Learning Analytics.

[W7] Krystle Phirangee*, Carrie Demmans Epp, Jim Hewitt. (accepted). Exploring How Peer and Instructor Facilitation Relates to Students’ Activity Patterns in Online Learning Communities. American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting 2016, Washington, D.C., USA.

Language Learning and Learner Modeling Projects

VocabNomad: VocabNomad is a mobile assisted language learning and communication support application. It is designed to be location aware and adapt to the user’s changing vocabulary support needs. Adaptivity is provided through the use of learner models that track the user’s language use and preferences. Standardized assessments of vocabulary knowledge were used to determine if the adaptive communication support that is provided by VocabNomad can help English language learners improve their vocabulary knowledge.

I have performed qualitative interviews with English language learners as part of a formative evaluation of VocabNomad’s base features. These interviews were used to determine additional application features that could better support learners’ needs.

A classroom-based deployment of the system took place in a Japanese senior high school, where improvements in student vocabulary knowledge and English proficiency were observed.

Project Leads: Carrie Demmans Epp (PhD Work)

Collaborators:

Stephen Tsourounis
Justin Djordjevic
Christopher Arnold
Semaphore, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Instruments: The MyLog experience sampling application

Publications:

[B1] Stephen Tsourounis, Carrie Demmans Epp. (in press). Learning Dashboards and Gamification in MALL: Design Guidelines in Practice. In A. Palalas and M. Ally (Eds.), The International Handbook of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning.

[J2] Carrie Demmans Epp. (2015). Mobile Adaptive Communication Support for Vocabulary Acquisition. Journal of Learning Analytics. 1(3), 173-175.

[c7] Carrie Demmans Epp*, Stephen Tsourounis, Justin Djordjevic, Ronald M. Baecker. (2013) Interactive Event: Enabling Vocabulary Acquisition while Providing Mobile Communication Support. Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) 2013, Memphis, TN, USA. 932-933.

[c6] Carrie Demmans Epp*. (2013) Mobile Adaptive Communication Support for Vocabulary Acquisition. Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) 2013, Memphis, TN, USA. 876-879.

[W1] Carrie Demmans Epp*, Ronald M. Baecker. (2012) Employing Adaptive Mobile Phone Applications for Scaffolding the Communication and Vocabulary Acquisition of Language Learners. Accepted to LearnLab's Annual Learning Science Workshop Use of Technology Toward Enhancing Achievement and Equity in the 21st Century, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

[P1] Carrie Demmans Epp^*, Ronald M. Baecker. (2011). VocabNomad: a Context-Sensitive Application for Mobile Assisted Language Learning. Young Researcher's Track poster Session at Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) 2011, Auckland, New Zealand.

Representing Uncertainty in Visualizations of Educational Data: Various forms of uncertainty are present in assessments of student knowledge and abilities. Measurement error and a lack of precision are among these sources of uncertainty, but they are rarely communicated through the visual representations that are used to report on student learning (i.e., open learner models and learning dashboards). This is in spite of the fact that this information can help us to properly interpret reports of student knowledge and learning.

I analyzed the visual representation of uncertainty across disciplines as well as the representation of information in open learner models and learning dashboards. The analyses of these two bodies of literature were combined to define a design space where we can begin to explore the representations of uncertainty within the reporting of educational data.

Project Lead: Carrie Demmans Epp

Collaborators:

Susan Bull

Publications:

[J4] Carrie Demmans Epp, Susan Bull. (2015). Uncertainty Representation in Visualizations ofLearning Analytics for Learners: Current Approaches and Opportunities. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT). Online First.

[S9] Carrie Demmans Epp, Susan Bull*, Matthew D. Johnson. (2014). Visualising Uncertainty for Open Learner Model Users. 22nd Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2014), Aalborg, Denmark. 9-14. [Best Poster Award]

Assessing Instructor Attitudes Towards Open Learner Models: A learner model is a system-level representation of the user's knowledge, beliefs, and abilities. An open learner model is a learner model where the user can see aspects of the underlying model. I am developing a scale that can be used to assess how instructors feel about their students use of e-learning systems that have open learner models. Results from the use of this instrument could be employed to target the development of e-learning systems to specific populations or to inform the refinement of these systems.

Project Lead: Carrie Demmans Epp

Publications:

[c5] Carrie Demmans Epp*. (2012) Developing a Scale for Assessing Instructor Attitudes Towards Open Leaner Models. In E. Herder, K. Yacef, L. Chen, & S. Weibelzhal (Eds.), Workshop and Poster Proceedings of the 20th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2012), Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (3 pages)

ProTutor: ProTutor was a Pronunciation Tutor for learners of Russian as a Foreign Language. It employed an open learner model to inform learners of changes in their abilities. This model also enabled the adaptive recommendation of learning materials to learners based on each learner’s pronunciation accuracy and the academic schedule of the course in which they were enrolled.

This system was deployed and evaluated with learners over the course of an academic year. Survey results along with usage statistics revealed that learners liked the system, thought it was ‘fun’, and that the historical information that had been included in the open learner model allowed them to see their progress and helped maintain their motivation.

Publications:

[c3] Carrie Demmans Epp^*, Gordon McCalla. (2011). ProTutor: Historic Open Learner Modeling for Pronunciation Tutoring. Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) 2011, Auckland, New Zealand. 441-443

Language Learning Projects (NOT Technology Based)

The Vocabulary Learning Project (VLP): The VLP is a reading tutoring program for teen-aged English language learners where a longitudinal assessment of the effect of a tutoring intervention on language acquisition is being performed. This includes the acquisition of phonemic knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension.

Within this project, I have administered and scored standardized and other tests that are being used as measures of each participant’s language proficiency.

Project Lead: Esther Geva

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