Preliminary Conference Agenda

The use of learning analytics (LA), defined as personalised learning environments through the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context, is rapidly expanding. A growing body of literature has questioned the benefits attributed to LA solutions and raised a number of concerns about the current developments in the education sector. However, we know little about how the beliefs, values and emotions of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping the adoption of learning analytics. Here, we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions shape UK-based higher education practitioners’ engagements with learning analytics? We conducted 34 semi-structured interviews and four focus groups with staff from a provider of digital services for UK higher education and staff from UK universities. With insights from this research, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics while being

critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations.

Digital inclusion research requires interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve a comprehensive understanding and develop effective strategies. This paper highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in digital inclusion research and provides a framework for understanding the contributions of different disciplines, using Library and Information Science, Computer Science, and Economics as examples. Specifically, it analyzes the relationship between these disciplines and digital inclusion, research topics related to digital inclusion, and research paradigms for studying digital inclusion. To address the three levels of the digital divide, the paper proposes an “Access - Capability - Outcome” three-layer relationship model to explain the functions of different disciplines in digital inclusion research. Additionally, two paths are proposed to promote integration and collaboration across different disciplines: the “inclusion technology for human” (technology-centered) path and the “inclusion of human in technology” (human-centered) path.

Abstract. Students with print disabilities frequently encounter the challenge of understanding alternative texts for complex, scholarly non-text contents. While a local solution exists, it is intellectually stimulating to explore this phenomenon more broadly in pertinent policies, standards, and academic literature. The process revealed that understandability appeared to be the most challenging barrier to in-formation accessibility despite being one of the widely accepted accessibility principles. For students with print disabilities to fully participate in equal educa-tion, the challenge of understandability, the last yard to information accessibility, must be dealt with. On the basis of local practices and literature analysis, this short paper presents reflections and suggestions. It is believed that collaboration between scholarly publishers, digital librarians, and universities, in addition to technologies, assistive and otherwise, is the most optimal solution.