Learning Sciences and Technologies

Personal Informatics for Intercultural Competence

Working and living internationally can be a rewarding but difficult experience. This project investigates how people gain intercultural competence while developing technology to support the learning experience. We are currently developing a system to help new international teaching assistants allow for increased and equitable discussion in the recitation sections they lead. For many ITAs, discussion has not been a part of their previous school experience.

Lowering Barriers to Access and Enhancing Play in MOOCs

If Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are the democratizing educational innovation that many claim them to be, then why do the largest proportion of MOOC learners hold a college degree or higher and live in the world’s most developed countries?

LASAD

The LASAD project is focused on helping students learn to argue, debate and think critically by working collaboratively on a webpage that allows creation and extension of a graphical argument.

IDEA: Evidence-Based Online Learning Courseware Engineering

This research aims to improve student learning effectiveness, efficiency, and enjoyment in online courses (aka MOOCs) by using online learning data to provide constructive feedback to course developers and instructors. The feedback provides assistance with the design and improvement of course activities and effective instruction. Online course development is often guided primarily by the intuition of the instructor.

Decimal Point

When it comes to learning math, how much fun you are having is rarely factored into the equation. That isn't to say that game designers have not tried to turn instruction into more engaging material. For instance, there are plenty of educational games on the shelves; unfortunately, very few of them have been shown, through empirical research, to lead to improved learning outcomes, particularly in mathematics.

Bazaar

Based on our experiences with designing and engineering multi-party conversational environments such as collaborative learning systems that involve integrating the state of the art in text classification and conversational agent technology, we are developing a framework that facilitates such integration

Adaptive Cyber-Learning With a Sensor Support

This project aims to better support student learning by adapting computer-based tutoring to individual learning phases and real-time capabilities. The specific research goal is to explore a method for automated sensor-based learner/learning assessment in intelligent tutoring systems.

VizWiz

VizWiz answers questions that people who are blind or visually impaired have about the things around them. Users take a photo, ask a question, and receive answers back quickly from people on the web (the crowd). VizWiz leverages color identification, text recognition, and recognition of objects seen before, but automatic methods are limited to a small subset of questions in practice. The bulk of remaining questions are answered by humans, e.g.

MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies

Cell phone applications that enable children in the villages and slums in the developing world to acquire language and literacy in immersive, game-like environments. These applications target localized language learning needs and aim to make literacy resources more accessible to underprivileged children, at times and places that are more convenient than schools.

SimStudent

SimStudent is a synthetic student that learns cognitive skills from worked-out examples (i.e., demonstrated solutions) and through tutored problem-solving. Technically, SimStudent is an application of programing by demonstration to generate a cognitive model.

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