Motivation and Overview

A recent explosion of public and academic interest in online education has accompanied high-profile offerings of massively open online courses (MOOCs) by some of the country’s leading education and research institutions, as well as by non-profits, companies and other content providers. This surge has particularly focused on undergraduate education, but this activity is occurring in the context of a long- standing online education landscape to research and practice for K-12 education, lifelong learning, and higher education. New ingredients, such as large scale (or massive), add significantly to the transformational possibilities of online education for accessibility, quality, and cost of education, as well as definitional changes to its boundaries, form, and content. The highly visible large-scale efforts of today, in fact, may be what drives education into an oft-touted, idealized, hiding-in-plain-sight ubiquity at small granularity, erasing boundaries between formal and informal education.

There are many research areas implicated by earlier, new, and future forms of online education. There are new slants on existing pedagogical questions of (a) curriculum design, to include distribution of curricula across institutions, across faculty and students, and across other content providers and consumers; (b) interaction design for online, face-to-face, and hybrid in-class and out-of-class experiences, including interactions facilitated by “flipped” classrooms and interactive forms yet to be imagined and developed; (c) personalized and otherwise customized learning; and (d) evaluations of student outcomes, with new forms of assessing traditional content knowledge and lifelong learning outcomes, all interwoven with issues of evaluation integrity, consistency, diversity, and scale up.

There are larger issues of social, behavioral, and economic sciences involving (a) synchronous and asynchronous interaction within and between local and global learning communities and the ways that these communities might evolve into other forms of collaboration and competition; (b) the repurposing of public and private spaces—such as libraries, healthcare facilities, and schools—to enable and promote flourishing local and global learning communities; and (c) the science of broadening participation, evaluating whether the ideals of large-scale online education are being realized or if wholly unanticipated disparities in access to education unfold. While local, face-to-face learning communities typically accompany MOOCs, online education instruments are, as yet, not designed with the variety of possible local formats in mind. All of these learning and community issues are likely conditioned on geographic, demographic, and other cultural factors that are as yet unconsidered.

In addition, ideal online and hybrid formats will likely vary with domain content from across the sciences, humanities, arts, and engineering disciplines. Thus, there are implications of online education for all academic disciplines.

Workshop Synopsis

Online Addendum to the Final Report on the Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education.

Participants explored computer science and multidisciplinary research agendas designed to improve formal and informal education. The workshop built on CCC’s earlier visioning activities on Global Resources for Online Education (GROE), addressing education-relevant research in areas such as intelligent student modeling through data mining, mobile computing for data logging, social networking, serious games, intelligent learning environments, HCI to facilitate educational interactions, computer-supported collaborative learning, interactive visualizations and simulations, and many other areas, to include research at the interface of computing and the social/behavioral sciences.

While the workshop built on a rich existing landscape of cyber-enabled education research, it was also informed by very recent developments, such as massively open online courses (MOOCs), that make important dimensions of scale and openness explicit. Throughout the workshop, issues of education and learningquality were at the forefront; how will the character of education change, and what are the important dimensions and evaluation methodologies for designing online educational instruments of quality at scale for different populations? What computing-relevant multidisciplinary research imperatives will grow to facilitate cyber-enabled transformations in online education?

This CCC visioning workshop addressed these and related questions on computing-relevant multidisciplinary research, looking 5-10 years out, for online education. Importantly, the workshop did not address shorter-term concerns such as credentialing and business models for online education ventures, except as these inform the workshop’s focus on longer-term research agendas.

Workshop Scope

Underlying the challenges and promises of online education are information and computing technology (ICT), which will facilitate geographically and temporally distributed interactions. This workshop asked participants to look beyond the current high-profile interest in MOOCs and to ideate on important research questions over the next 10 years in all areas of computing in support of online and hybrid education formats. While computing is obviously the vital enabling technology in current large scale and highly visible educational activities, it will be an equally important to enable education that is so ubiquitous and embedded that it hides in plain sight.

Some of the areas of computing important in support of online education, to include directions of massive scale-up and ubiquity, are listed here, but they are not exhaustive.

(A) Human-Computer Interfaces

How do we develop dynamic assessment within online and hybrid formats? How do we develop learning models that represent what learners know, along with when and how knowledge was learned? How can algorithms identify pedagogy that worked best for each individual? How do we address the communicative interaction between learner and software and use multimedia to switch modalities as appropriate? How can intelligent ambient environments reason about student cognition? What interfaces best support computer-supported collaborative learning, both collocated and at a distance, both synchronous and asynchronous?

(B) Large Amounts Student Data

How do we use educational data mining and machine learning to effectively store, make available, and analyze data for different purposes? How do we ensure security and privacy of student data? How do we address the deluge of data and new data mining, and database techniques? Who are the potential consumers of this data, e.g., how can data be distilled for assessment content so it is useful for each stakeholder? How will application imperatives, such as automated grading of complex student inputs, inform new algorithms for data mining of like complex structures? How can machine learning of student models be used to bring students together in like or otherwise complementary learning cohorts?

(C) Mobile Computing

How can mobile computing be leveraged best to support education? What is the nature of student/faculty interaction through mobile computing? How does technology support universal access to global classrooms, including for the developing world where mobile technology has a more significant presence than other computing platforms? Which technical issues should be addressed to support tracking, personalizing, and supporting multiple learning activities? How do we facilitate the integration of online higher education with physically distributed course projects (e.g., involving data collection)?

(D) Social Computing

Once online higher education in embedded in larger social contexts, how can computational systems support student collaboration and engagement? What is the process by which teams work in virtual, collaborative learning environments? Which tools will match learners with other learners and/or with mentors, taking into account learner interests? How can software both support collaboration and coach students about content? How do we examine learning communities? How do learning communities morph into global communities with orientations beyond education? For example, how do learning communities sustain, build on, and share knowledge? How do we address infrastructure (API, management) and application level (representation) issues? What integrations/mash-ups of devices/platforms would more effectively support social learning distributed across time, space and media?

Clearly, in addition to expertise in the various computing fields, workshop participants will have expertise in education and cognitive psychology, the learning sciences more generally, and expertise at the intersection of these various fields. This workshop will build on earlier CRA/CCC-supported visioning workshops on Global Resources for Online Education (GROE), culminating in A Roadmap for Education Technology (RET, 2010), which identified research areas for online education to 2030. Again, the current workshop will address research questions implicated by key new characteristics such as scale-up to massively open environments. Thus, while the computing community is centric in its orientation, it is critical that research questions at the boundaries of computing with education and the learning sciences be identified.

Workshop Format and Anticipated Output:

The two-day workshop of 60-90 participants was held February 11-12, 2013 in Washington, DC. Organizers and other participants were selected from among researchers and educators with expertise in research areas relevant to scale-up of online education as well as representatives from institutions of higher education at the forefront of online efforts. While the focus was on identifying research issues and questions at the intersection on computing, education, and learning sciences research, the organizers also recognize that there are critical, albeit little understood, relationships between computing and human behavior generally, and some participants were selected for their broader expertise at the intersection of computing and the broader behavioral sciences, with a view that unanticipated consequences (e.g., of fragmentation, disparities) in online higher education technologies and practices can in fact be identified.

The workshop included plenary speakers overviewing both current and planned online activities and strategies, breakout sessions to ideate on research directions and requirements, and panels to begin the process of synthesis.

Prior to the workshop, the organizers asked participants to send in their thoughts on workshop topics, with a view that these topics can be broadened and deepened by larger community ideation. Moreover, participants were asked to identify others who they feel should participate, to inform later rounds of invitations.

Following distribution of initial findings, a one day report-out by approximately five workshop organizers (some of who may participate remotely) will be held at NSF—or elsewhere in the immediate vicinity of Washington DC—to summarize workshop findings and allow remarks by representatives of government bodies (e.g., NSF, Department of Education, Congress) and national groups (e.g., Association of American Universities, Education Sector), particularly those who were not able to send representatives to the Workshop itself. Concurrent with the release of the report, or a week or two prior, a draft workshop summary will be posted to the CRA/CCC Website for open community comment.

A final report, informed by all previous activities (pre-workshop ideation, workshop, post-workshop report out, and open community forum) will be issued, identifying promising research and development areas and trajectories for computing that were oriented towards transforming higher education through online mechanisms.