Smart School Multimodal Dataset and Challenges

Abstract

As part of a research project aiming to explore the notion of ‘smart school’ (especially for STEM education) in Estonia, we are developing classrooms and schools that incorporate data gathering not only from digital traces, but also physical ones (through a variety of sensors). This workshop contribution describes briefly the setting and our initial efforts in setting up a classroom that is able to generate such a multimodal dataset. The paper also describes some of the most important challenges that we are facing as we setup the project and attempt to build up such dataset, focusing on the specifics of doing it in an everyday, authentic school setting. We believe these challenges provide a nice sample of those that the multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) community will have to face as it transitions from an emergent to a mainstream community of research and practice.