Field report for Platform mBox: Designing an Open MMLA Platform

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) is an evolving sector within learning analytics that has become increasingly useful for examining complex learning and collaboration dynamics for group work across all educational levels. The availability of low-cost sensors and affordable computational power allows researchers to investigate different modes of group work. However, the field faces challenges stemming from the complexity and specialization of the systems required for capturing diverse interaction modalities, with commercial systems often being expensive or narrow in scope and researcher-developed systems needing to be more specialized and difficult to deploy. Therefore, more user-friendly, adaptable, affordable, open-source, and easy-to-deploy systems are needed to advance research and application in the MMLA field. The paper presents a field report on the design of mBox that aims to support group work across different contexts. We share the progress of mBox, a low-cost, easy-to-use platform grounded on learning theories to investigate collaborative learning settings. Our approach has been guided by iterative design processes that let us rapidly prototype different solutions for these settings.