A platform to Motivate!

StudyLens is a Learning Support System

It helps the students visualize their learning progress and provides them a quick access to hand-curated learning materials.

StudyLens is based on research

The design of the system is inspired by past research in Educational Psychology, Human Computer Interaction, and Learning Analytics.

StudyLens is getting better

By analyzing the application usage and feedback from the students, we try to better understand what motivates the students and what does not, and improve the system accordingly over time.

What is StudyLens?

Studylens is a Learning Support System that helps students evaluate their understanding of the topics thoroughly and find learning material that helps them reach where they want to be.

Knowledge Map

Knowledge Map is the central point of interaction. It visualizes a student's expertise of across the topics in a course and provides direct access to learning resources.

Formative Assessments

StudyLens provide a powerful Formative Assessment system that computes the scores through the hierarchy of the concepts.

StudyLens is currently funded by Utrecht University's Utrecht Education Incentive Fund.

Using StudyLens

Students can view the Concepts and topics related to the Learning Goals in the course. A learning goal is made active based on the curriculum plan and students are asked to take a formative test to understand their expertise on each topic. Based on the configuration, they are allowed to see where their expertise stands in comparison to other students in the course.



The system empowers them to explore their gaps in the learning and decide which concepts or topics they want to strengthen next. When they click a Concept, they can get direct access to the remedial material used by them.

When they complete a learning material, the system nudges them by showing progress towards the mastery of the concept.

 

Studylens provides personalized learning support to the students and helps them explore their understanding (or misunderstanding) and use the learning material to attain the learning objectives.

Research

Areas of Focus

Social Comparison

Social Comparison has been leveraged via gamification tools like Leaderboards to motivate students. But these one-size-fits-all tools don't motivate all the students the same way. We are exploring more adaptive Social Comparison strategies to motivate students in online learning.

Self Regulated Learning

Self Regulated Learning strategies look at Forethought, Process, and Reflection phases of the learning process. We're looking at supporting the students build their own strategies for these phases with the help of StudyLens.

Learning Analytics Dashboards

We are researching how the LA dashboards can be made more concise, yet powerful so that students use the features that are provided to them.



Publications and Reports

  • Sergey Sosnovsky, Qixiang Fang, Benjamin de Vries, Sven Luehof, and Fred Wiegant.
    Towards Adaptive Social Comparison for Education.
    In European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, pp. 421-426. Springer, Cham, 2020.
  • Aditya Joshi
    Supporting student motivation through Social Comparison
    In Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium of the Seventeenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, September 12–16, 2022, Toulouse, France.

F.A.Q

Frequently Asked Questions

  • There is virtually no limit, but the largest course we hosted so far had around 450 students. StudyLens should be able to support any university level courses.

  • Setting up a new course requires thorough planning, preparation of assessment material, learning material, and hosting the course in the server. We advise you to plan ahead by one university term (3 months). The actual man-hours depend on the course design.

  • We currently support pdfs (factsheets, books, papers), video (youtube), html (written material), podcasts, and interactive. Interactive material should be able to embed in an external webpage. We're working on supporting few more learning material types to support more interactive learning.

  • Not yet. Studylens supports formative assessment tests that students can take at their own pace. We have plans to implement timed test functionality and it might be available till after Fall 2023.

Team

Sergey Sosnovsky

Project Leader, Assistant Professor

Aditya Joshi

PhD Student

Floris Bos

Student Developer

Luc van der Zandt

Masters Student

Pauline Alvarez

Masters Student