The following is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. In this blog entry, Doug highlights the CCC-sponsored visioning activity on Online Education, which will be held next week.

The CCC-sponsored Workshop for Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education (MROE) convenes Monday and Tuesday of next week (February 11-12) at the Grand Hyatt in Washington D.C.  An impressive group of about 70 academic and industry participants, and many observers from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and elsewhere, will explore and delineate computer science and multidisciplinary research agendas designed to improve formal and informal education.

The workshop will build on CCC’s earlier visioning activities on Global Resources for Online Education (GROE), addressing education-relevant research in areas such as intelligent student modeling through data mining, personalized learning, evaluating student learning, social networking, serious games, intelligent learning environments, HCI to facilitate educational interactions, computer-supported collaborative learning, the pedagogical requirements of different domain areas, and many other areas at the interface of computing and the social/behavioral sciences.

While the workshop will build on a rich existing landscape of cyber-enabled education research, it also will be informed by very recent developments, such as massively open online courses (MOOCs) that make important dimensions of scale and openness explicit. Throughout the workshop, issues of education and learning quality will be also at the forefront; how will the character of education change, and what are the important dimensions and evaluation methodologies for designing online educational instruments of quality at scale for different populations? What computing-relevant multidisciplinary research imperatives will grow to facilitate cyber-enabled transformations in online education?

This CCC visioning workshop will address these and related questions on computing-relevant multidisciplinary research, looking 5-10 years out, for online education. Importantly, the workshop will not address shorter-term concerns such as credentialing and business models for online education ventures, except as these inform the workshop’s focus on longer-term research agendas.

The workshop is organized around small breakout groups in a variety of areas to promote the elaboration of a wide variety of ideas, as well as plenary talks, panels, and open discussion forums to help structure the discussion and to make a bare start at what promises to be a challenging but rewarding period of synthesis, culminating in a comprehensive report at the beginning of summer.

For the benefit of many who cannot attend the workshop, the plenary sessions will be webcast live at: http://summitwebcasting.com/webcast/MROE/