This article is published in the September 2015 issue.

Computer-Aided Personalized Education Workshop


People at computerThe CCC Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop will be held in Washington, D.C. on November 12-13.

The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of computer science, for example, the number of U.S. students enrolled in introductory courses has grown threefold in the past decade. Recently, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms; namely, the assessment of students’ knowledge and providing meaningful feedback to individual students.

To tackle these problems, computing research needs to create a new agenda, one that:

  • formalizes tasks such as assessment and feedback as computational problems
  • develops algorithmic tools to solve resulting problems at scale
  • incorporates these tools in learning environments.

The focus of the CAPE workshop will be on college-level courses in computer science, mathematics, and physics, with the goals of:

  • creating a long-term research agenda by bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines, such as logical reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and education and learning,
  • inspiring other researchers to work on these problems
  • and, ultimately, developing technology for effective and personalized learning.

For more information, please see the Computer-Aided Personalized Education website or contact Ann Drobnis.