PLOOC 2014 - Workshop on Programming Languages Technology for Massive Open Online Courses

Massive open online courses present a broad set of challenges ranging from automated grading and feedback, automatic problem generation, plagiarism detection, as well as new issues such as how to enhance collaboration and peer tutoring across the web. Formal methods are set to play a big role in this inter-disciplinary endeavor. The goal of this new workshop is to explore how formal methods technologies related to specification, verification, and synthesis can be applied to solve some of these problems in the context of MOOCS, and how these technologies can be leveraged and enhanced in the traditional classroom. We are interested in application of these technologies to a wide variety of subject domains including programming, logic, automata theory, math, and science.
The workshop will bring together researchers from the programming languages community with instructors who have experienced teaching MOOCs. The idea is to highlight some of the pain points that could be addressed by verification and synthesis technologies, and to bring together ideas on how to address these problems. The workshop will include 30 minute talks discussing new work and ideas in this area, as well as invited talks on challenges and open problems and plenty of time for questions and discussion.