Feature Engineering for Second Language Acquisition Modeling

Knowledge tracing serves as a keystone in delivering personalized education. However, few works attempted to model students’ knowledge state in the setting of Second Language Acquisition. The Duolingo Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling (Settles et al., 2018) provides students’ trace data that we extensively analyze and engineer...

Activating Learning at Scale: A Review of Innovations in Online Learning Strategies

Taking advantage of the vast history of theoretical and empirical findings in the learning literature we have inherited, this research offers a synthesis of prior findings in the domain of empirically evaluated active learning strategies in digital learning environments. The primary concern of the present study is to evaluate these findings with...

LearningQ: A Large-scale Dataset for Educational Question Generation

We present LearningQ, a challenging educational question generation dataset containing over 230K document-question pairs. It includes 7K instructor-designed questions assessing knowledge concepts being taught and 223K learner-generated questions seeking in-depth understanding of the taught concepts. We show that, compared to existing datasets...

From Learners to Earners: Enabling MOOC Learners to Apply Their Skills and Earn Money in an Online Market Place

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aim to educate the world. More often than not, however, MOOCs fall short of this goal — a majority of learners are already highly educated (with a Bachelor degree or more) and come from specific parts of the (developed) world. Learners from developing countries without a higher degree are underrepresented,...

Concept Focus: Semantic Meta-Data For Describing MOOC Content

MOOCs promised to herald a new age of open education.<br/>However, efficient access to MOOC content is still hard, thus unneces-<br/>sarily complicating many use cases like efficient re-use of material, or<br/>tailored access for life-long learning scenarios. One of the reasons for this<br/>lack of accessibility is the shortage of meaningful...

Buying time: Enabling learners to become earners with a real-world paid task recommender system

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aim to educate the world, especially learners from developing countries. While MOOCs are certainly available to the masses, they are not yet fully accessible. Although all course content is just clicks<br/>away, deeply engaging with a MOOC requires a substantial time commitment, which frequently becomes a...

Follow the successful crowd: Raising MOOC completion rates through social comparison at scale

Social comparison theory asserts that we establish our social and personal worth by comparing ourselves to others. In in-person learning environments, social comparison offers students critical feedback on how to behave and be successful. By contrast, online learning environments afford fewer social cues to facilitate social comparison. Can...