Associate Professor Vitomir Kovanović

I am an Associate Professor at UniSA Education Futures and Associate Director (Research Excellence and Communication) of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), a research centre studying the interplay between human and artificial cognition and how it affects human learning and knowledge processes. My primary research interests are in Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in Education, with a particular focus on developing approaches for measuring the development of complex skills and competencies. I am particularly interested in students' self-regulation of learning and understanding how trace data can be used to gain a deeper understanding of learning processes. I obtained my PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom, in 2017. I am highly active in the Learning Analytics research community and currently serve as a Co-editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics (JLA), a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that disseminates the highest quality research in the Learning Analytics field. I also serve as an Associate Editor at the Higher Education Research & Development (HERD) Journal and was previously an academic editor of PLoS ONE Journal and Program Chair of the 10th Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK20) Conference.

My Erdös number is 4

1. Erdös, P., Harary, F., & Klawe, M. (1980) Residually complete graphs. Combinatorial mathematics, optimal designs and their applications (Proc. Sympos. Combin. Math. and Optimal Design, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, Colo., 1978). Ann. Discrete Math. 6, 117--123.

2. Gauthier, J., Fisher, B., & Klawe, M. (2003) Peer Presence and Real-Time Assessment: A Symbiotic Relationship. Proceedings of EdMedia 2003, Honolulu, HI.

3. Al-Hajj, S., Pike, I., Riecke, B., & Fisher, B. (2013) Visual Analytics for Public Health: Supporting Knowledge Construction and Decision-Making. 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Wailea, HI, USA

4. Joksimovic, S., Gaševic, D., Kovanovic, V., Riecke, B., & Hatala, M. (2015). Social presence in online discussions as a process predictor of academic performance. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 31, 638–654. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12107

Governance:

• 2019 - Present: Secretary, Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). solaresearch.org
• 2017 - Present: Executive committee member, Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). solaresearch.org

Membership: 

• InterLab. interlab.me
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). www.acm.org
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). www.ieee.org
• International Educational Data Mining Society (IEDMS). www.educationaldatamining.org
• International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education (IAIED). iaied.org
• Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). solaresearch.org
• ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). sigcse.org
• IEEE Education Society (IEEE EDU). ieee-edusociety.org
• GOOD OLD AI Research Network (GOAI). goodoldai.org

Qualifications

• Informatics PhD The University of Edinburgh

Work history

Academic positions

Research Fellow, School of Education, University of South Australia (Oct 2017 – present)

• Learning analytics and Educational data mining research

Data Scientist, School of Education, University of South Australia (Oct 2017 – present)

• Analysis of UniSA student learning data
• Development of learning analytics for UniSA online learning programs

Research experience

Research Associate, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (Feb 2015 – Sep 2017)

• Work on Intel Education funded project “Adaptive Learning."
• Preparation of an SSHRC Insight grant on the role of affect in online learning and the ways to measure and detect student emotions and affect.
• Collaboration with Boeing, NASA, and Microsoft regarding the analysis of edX data from the model-based systems engineering program.

Research Assistant, LINK Lab, University of Texas Arlington, USA (Aug 2014 – Sep 2017)

• Work on an NSF Grant #1546271 “BIGDATA: Collaborative Research: F: Study of a Cyber-Enabled Social Computing Framework for Improving Practice in Online Computing Communities.”
• Preparation of a grant for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation looking at the analytics of social collaboration in the cross-institutional research network.
• Analysis of “Data, Analytics, and Learning” MOOC course data.
• Work on Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded “MOOC Research Initiative (MRI)” project.
• edX Data Tsar (collection of the MOOC data from edX).

Research Assistant, Ryerson University, Canada (Dec 2014 – Aug 2015)

• Software development work on Denote, a Name-entity tagger.

Research Assistant, Athabasca University, Canada (Sep 2012 – Jan 2013)

• Work on SSHRC Insight project “Tools and Methods to Help Learners Self-regulate Learning and Increase Learning Success.”
• Work on NSERC Engage project “Analytics for Social Learning Environments” in collaboration with Desire2Learn.

Research Assistant, Simon Fraser University, Canada (Sep 2011 – Jan 2012)

• Work on NSERC Engage project “Requirements and verification engineering for workflows based on event-driven architectures” in collaboration with EMRLogic.

Industry experience

Senior Data Scientist, Genuine Market Research, UK (May 2015 – Sep 2017)

• Data mining of market research data.
• Development of data analytics solutions and visualizations.

Software Engineer, Mozzart Ltd., Serbia (Apr 2008 – Aug 2011)

• Development and maintenance of server-side architecture of a distributed Java-based information system for sports betting.
• Development of software deployment platform.
• Development of UX framework for the internal client application.

Software engineer intern, Mozzart Ltd., Serbia (Jun 2005 – Aug 2005)

• Development of log analysis tool.