The following is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University and Armando Fox, Professor in Residence of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley.
In February 2013, Doug and Armando co-chaired the Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education (MROE). In this blog entry, they revisit that CCC-sponsored visioning activity, and also spotlight the upcoming ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, which is being co-organized by Armando.
New venues for reporting scholarship on “learning at scale”, to include massive open online courses (MOOCs), are emerging. Notable among these is the First Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, which will be held March 4-5, 2014 in Atlanta, GA, USA.
“This conference is intended to promote scientific exchange of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of the learning sciences and computer science. Inspired by the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the accompanying huge shift in thinking about education, this conference was created by ACM as a new scholarly venue and key focal point for the review and presentation of the highest quality research on how learning and teaching can change and improve when done at scale.”
The ACM conference, which is co-located with the Annual Technical Symposium of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2014), is accepting paper submissions and tutorial proposals (due November 8, 2013), as well as works-in-progress submissions (due January 2, 2014).
Dimensions of scale, as well as openness, were also a focus of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education (MROE) in February 2013. The talks and breakout groups of the MROE workshop, which can be found online, explored the research opportunities at the intersection of the learning sciences, and the many areas of computing, to include human-computer interactions, social computing, machine learning and data mining, and mobile computing. The MROE workshop was broader than the point values of “massive” and “open” per se, recognizing that these extreme values make explicit, in ways not fully appreciated previously, variability along multiple dimensions of scale and openness. Indeed, the elaboration of these multidimensional spaces is a research challenge that the upcoming report of the MROE workshop hopes to spell out – stay tuned to the CCC MROE website.
In addition to the First Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, other venues for scholarship in this area are coming up, such as the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interactions on Online Learning at Scale (http://tochi.acm.org/si/online-learning.shtml), with a December 20 submission deadline, as well as research collections that are in press, such as the special issue on MOOCs of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (http://jolt.merlot.org/jolt_moocs_cfp.pdf).
