The CCC Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop will be held in Washington, DC on November 12-13th. 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, namely, assessment of students’ knowledge and providing meaningful feedback to individual students. To tackle these problems […]

The following is a guest post by Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her collaborators were Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and Kevin Schulman of Duke University School of Medicine.  A computer scientist, doctor, and business professor all walked into a MOOC… Well, not exactly, but it is not far off from the HarvardX MOOC on healthcare innovation organized by Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and featuring domain experts such as Dr. Kevin Schulman of Duke and me. Called “Innovating in Healthcare,” our goal was to engage participants in “evaluating opportunities and the elements of viable business models for […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Melanie Mitchell, Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie is the Director of the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer project.  The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has launched a web-based educational platform, Complexity Explorer. SFI is a private research institute well known for its cross-disciplinary approach to complex systems such as ant colonies, biological cells, economies, and social systems.   The stated mission of the institute is to “discover, comprehend, and communicate the common fundamental principles in complex physical, computational, biological, and social systems that underlie many […]