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 […]

The following post was co-authored by Andrew Lan, a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. Andrew recently attended the Computing Community Consortium Computer-Aided Personalized Education Workshop in Washington, DC.  The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms, […]