The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Computer-Aided Personalized Education has released their workshop report.

The workshop, held in November 2015, brought together over 50 researchers in the fields of education, computer science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive psychology to address the challenges and future directions of computing-based educational tools. This growing agenda in computing research includes formalizing tasks such as assessment and feedback as computational problems, developing algorithmic tools to solve resulting problems at scale, and incorporating these tools effectively in learning environments.

The report examines emerging trends, such as logical reasoning, machine learning, student-computer interaction, and learning science in order to come up with a research roadmap that could enable computer-aided personalized education technology to have a positive impact on society.

The roadmap identifies an abundance of promising research topics that should be explored in the next few years. A few of these topics are:

• Mental models for feedback: Developing tools that not only give feedback based on the student submission, but also returns feedback based on some modeling of the state of the student, such as learning style and past knowledge
• Multi-modal interfaces: Improvements in sensor technology is leading to new modes of human computer interaction, such as by text, by speech, and by touch. These kinds of natural modes of interactions are very important for developing personalized educational tools.
• Long-term learning outcomes: The integration of cognitive science and computing tools can help to improve, not only learning over a course or semester, but long-term learning outcomes.

To learn more about the workshops recommendations, please read the full report.