WPL 2013 - First Annual Rice Workshop on Personalized Learning

First Annual Rice Workshop on Personalized Learning
Rice University
Sponsors
Rice University Office of the Provost
Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I)
George R. Brown School of Engineering
STEMscopes
Workshop Theme: “Scaling Up Success”
Revitalizing education at all levels and in all subject areas is a
major priority in the United States. In order to properly educate the
leaders of tomorrow, we must move beyond the centuries-old, ingrained
paradigm of education that views the process of learning as “one-way
street” in which knowledge is transmitted from teacher to learner via
paper textbooks and lectures. Instead, we must provide learners with
tools to effectively engage in self-regulated learning outside the
classroom.
Over the past decades, significant progress has been made on
computer-based personalized learning that is responsive to the needs,
skills, and characteristics of individual students. A personalized
learning system closes the learning feedback loop by continuously
monitoring and analyzing learner interactions with learning resources
in order to assess progress, and providing timely remediation,
enrichment, or practice based on that analysis. Recently, learning
analytics and personalized learning systems have leapt from the
research lab to the marketplace. Indeed, much of the ed-tech startup
activity and investment has been in this space.
Despite this early success, many important issues and challenges
remain to be surmounted before personalized learning reaches the
mainstream. The goal of this (annual) workshop is to bring together
the intellectual leaders of this new movement in order to exchange
ideas, network, and plot a course to the future. A particular focus
will be on how machine learning and “big data” have the potential to
create new efficiencies in time and cost and significantly improve
learning outcomes. The scope of the conference will encompass PK-12
through college and lifelong learning, and will be primarily an
in-person event, but it will also be webcast and archived for later
viewing.
The workshop takes place the day before the fifth annual
Connexions/OpenStax College Conference, which will be held 23-25 April
2013 on the Rice University campus. See conference.cnx.org for more
information.
Confirmed presenters:
? David Kuntz, VP-Research for Knewton
? Steven Ritter, VP-Research for Carnegie Learning
? David Pritchard, MIT
? Ryan Baker, Columbia
? Neil Heffernan, WPI
? Winslow Burleson, ASU
? David Eagleman, BCM
? Dan Wallach, Rice
? Anna Rafferty, UC-Berkeley
? Zach Pardos, MIT
? Greg Krudysz, GaTec
Conference website: http://rdls.rice.edu/personalized-learning-worksho...