CCC to Hold Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 14, 2012
On February 11-12, 2013, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) – an activity of the Computing Research Association (CRA) – will hold a workshop to explore and delineate computer science and multidisciplinary research agendas designed to improve formal and informal education. For more information, visit the workshop webpage here.
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, non-profits, and industry. Research questions at the intersection of computing and education and the learning sciences still need to be identified.
The workshop participants will include experts in the various computing fields, education and cognitive psychology, the learning sciences, and the intersection of these fields.
During the workshop, plenary speakers will overview both current and planned online activities and strategies. Participants will look beyond the current high-profile interest in MOOCs and investigate future important research questions in all areas of computing in support of online and hybrid education formats for the next 10 years. In breakout sessions, groups will explore research directions and requirements, and panels will begin the process of synthesis.
The four main discussion topics will include human-computer interfaces, large amounts of student data, mobile computing, and social computing. Additional issues to be explored are education and learning quality, changes in the character of education, evaluation methodologies for designing online educational instruments of quality of scale for different populations, and computing-relevant multidisciplinary research imperatives needed to facilitate cyber-enabled transformations in online education. While the workshop will build on a rich existing landscape of cyber-enabled education research, it also will be informed by very recent developments, such as MOOCs, that make important dimensions of scale and openness explicit.
The workshop, is an extension of CCC’s earlier visioning activities on Global Resources for Online Education, which addressed education-relevant research in areas such as intelligent student modeling through data mining, mobile computing for data logging, social networking, and many other areas, to include research at the interface of computing and the social/behavioral sciences.
Following the distribution of initial findings, the workshop organizers will summarize workshop findings and allow remarks by representatives of government agencies, Congress and national education organizations such as the Association of American Universities and Education Sector. Concurrently, a draft workshop summary will be posted to the CRA/ CCC website for open community comment. A final report, informed by all the workshop activities, will identify promising research and development areas and trajectories for computing that are oriented towards transforming higher education through online mechanisms.
For more information, visit the workshop webpage here.
About the CCC: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC; http://cra.org/ccc) was established in fall 2006 under a Cooperative Agreement between the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). A standing committee of CRA, the CCC seeks to mobilize the computing research community to debate long-range challenges and build consensus around specific research visions. The CCC specifically pursues the next big computing ideas that will define the future of the field, attract the very best talent, and catalyze research investment and public support in the long term.
About the CRA: The Computing Research Association (CRA; http://cra.org/) was established 40 years ago and has members at more than 220 North American academic, industrial, and government research entities. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
For more information: Contact Kenneth Hines, Program Associate at the Computing Community Consortium: khines@cra.org; 202-266-2936.
