Companion Proceedings of the 10th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK’20)

We are pleased to welcome you to the Tenth International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK20), organized by the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). This year’s conference is hosted by Goethe University in the beautiful city of Frankfurt, Germany on March 23–27, 2020, a place of tremendous importance and rich history of science, art, and philosophy. While this is the first time that LAK is organized in Germany, we want to acknowledge that it is a tremendous collaborative effort by the international community of learning analytics researchers and practitioners. Being the tenth anniversary of the conference, the theme for LAK20 is “Celebrating 10 years of LAK: Shaping the future of the field” and focuses on celebrating the achievements of the learning analytics community in the first ten years as well as on charting a pathway for the next ten years. The LAK20 conference is intended for both researchers and practitioners, and we invite them to come and join a proactive dialogue around the future of learning analytics and its practical adoption. We further extend our invite to educators, leaders, administrators, and government and industry professionals interested in the field of learning analytics and related disciplines.

Continuing the trend from previous LAK editions, we received record numbers of high-quality submissions. The research track received 261 submissions (137 full paper submissions and 124 short paper submissions), which represents a 23% increase in the total number of submissions. Overall, from the 261 research papers, the program committee worked very hard to select 80 papers (50 full research papers and 30 short research papers). As usual, the research papers are published as Proceedings by the ACM.

In addition to the full and short papers of the research track, we have accepted 10 practitioner reports, 41 research posters, 11 practitioner posters, 8 demos, 11 doctoral consortium submissions, and 22 workshop proposals. Some of these workshops had their own call for papers and their accepted submissions are included in these Companion Proceedings as well. We are most grateful for all the hard work by the practitioner, workshop, poster & demo and doctoral consortium chairs as well as by the program committee and their insightful and constructive comments and reviews. In total, over 1,000 reviews and meta-reviews have been provided by the LAK20 program committee. These Companion Proceedings could not have been done without their generous help and support.

While we celebrate the amazing achievements from the past 10 years of LAK, we are also very aware of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the learning analytics community, with many different theoretical and methodological stances. The vision of SoLAR for the LAK conference is to build a welcoming and inclusive space where learning analytics researchers and practitioners with diverse viewpoints can engage in productive conversations that will only strengthen our impact and contribution to the improvement of teaching and learning for years to come.

Our hope is that the LAK20 participants and the readers of these proceedings will strengthen their connections with the rapidly growing learning analytics community. We believe that the use of data and analytics for the advancement of learning is only possible through productive dialogue between practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals. In this regard, the LAK conference plays a central role in bringing those different stakeholders together to discuss the recent advancements in the learning analytics field and how they can be used for research-informed practice and policy development. We hope that these proceedings will provide a solid foundation for discussing our successes and failures in the past ten years, but more importantly the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us for the next ten years.