I was invited to deliver a keynote at the SITE Interactive online conference 2021 Keynote on “Restoring Context in Online Teaching with Artificial Intelligence and Multimodal Learning Experiences”. The keynote paper to be published in the proceedings of the conference on the Learning & Technology Library.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic forced more than 1.6 billion learners out of school, becoming the most challenging disruption ever endured by the global education systems. In many countries, education institutions decided to move their regular activities online, opting for remote teaching as an emergency solution to continue their education. Meanwhile, physical distancing and learning in isolation are heavily challenging learners and hindering their study success. There is a compelling need to make education systems more resilient and less vulnerable to future disruptions in such a critical landscape. In particular, we have to reconsider how digital technologies can support online and hybrid teaching. In recent years, video conferencing tools and learning management systems have improved to make educational resources more available and education more flexible. However, the modes of interaction they implement remain essentially unnatural for the learner due to a substantial lack of context. Modern sensor-enabled computer systems allow extending the standard human-computer interface for multimodal communication. The advances in Artificial Intelligence allow interpreting the data collected from multimodal and multi-sensor devices. These insights can be used to support online teaching and learning in isolation with personalised feedback and adaptation through Multimodal Learning Experiences (MLX). In this keynote paper, I analyse the benefits and caveats of MLX and Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) for online teaching. I describe three existing MLX systems to illustrate the possible ways of how these technologies can support online teaching.
