To find a balance between learning analytics research and individual privacy, learning analytics initiatives need to appropriately address ethical, privacy, and data protection issues. A range of general guidelines, model codes, and principles for handling ethical issues and for appropriate data and privacy protection are available, which may serve the consideration of these topics in a learning analytics context. The importance and significance of data security and protection are also reflected in national and international laws and directives, where data protection is usually considered as a fundamental right. Existing guidelines, approaches, and regulations served as a basis for elaborating a comprehensive privacy and data protection framework for the LEA's BOX project. It comprises a set of eight principles to derive implications for ensuring ethical treatment of personal data in a learning analytics platform and its services. The privacy and data protection policy set out in the framework is translated into the learning analytics technologies and tools that were developed in the project and may be used as best practice for other learning analytics projects.

Abstract. We study a recent timestep adaptation technique for hyperbolic conservation laws. The key tool is a space-time splitting of adjoint error representations for target functionals due to Süli[19] and Hartmann [13]. It provides an efficient choice of timesteps for implicit computations of weakly instationary flows. The timestep will be very large in regions of stationary flow, and become small when a perturbation enters the flow field. Besides using adjoint techniques which are already well-established, we also add a new ingredient which simplifies the computation of the dual problem. Due to Galerkin orthogonality, the dual solution ϕ does not enter the error representation as such. Instead, the relevant term is the difference of the dual solution and its projection to the finite element space, ϕ − ϕ h . We can show that it is therefore sufficient to compute the spatial gradient of the dual solution, w = ∇ϕ. This gradient satisfies a conservation law instead of a transport equation, and it can therefore be computed with the same algorithm as the forward problem, and in the same finite element space. We demonstrate the capabilities of the approach for a weakly instationary test problem for scalar conservation laws.

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Abstract. This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts.

Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment