Amber Hoefkens is professionally passionate about learning analytics, data visualization, data literacy and soft skills.
Amber is a researcher within the Research Center Lifelong Learning and Innovation (OLLI/RELLI), where she is also coordinator of the center of expertise 'Learning and development with the help of data'.
After completing her master's degree in Communication Sciences, specializing in Media Studies (University of Antwerp), Amber started in 2015 as a researcher at market research agency GfK. Here the focus was mainly on social and strategic government projects. Since 2019 she has been working as a researcher at AP University College. She started on projects on soft skills, and more specifically measuring and developing soft skills in higher education students, job seekers and employees. Her interests quickly expanded to data visualization, data literacy, learning analytics and effective feedback (dashboards).
As a coordinator, she tries to further expand the center of expertise 'Learning and development with the help of data'. Within this center of expertise we support organizations in the field of data interpretation and the formulation of data-driven actions, in order to increase the learning effect of their data. To this end, we focus on increasing data literacy among users, developing relevant and user-friendly data visualizations and dashboards (together) and linking analyzes to useful feedback and interventions.