Chuang & Seaton to present on their research with MITx data

This Thursday, Nov 21 at 1:30, Isaac Chuang and Daniel  Seaton will present as part of ODL's xTalks: Digital Discourses seminar series. Their talk, titled "Research with MITx Data", will focus on their work with data generated from MITx and edX.

The MITx program has generated a tremendous amount of data, both on edX and residentially at MIT.  From the 14 MITx on edX courses, there are over 500 million records of events coming from over 600 thousand students; from the 23 residential MITx courses, we have records from over 2,700 student interactions.  This data is a tremendous resource for understanding learning and improving courses.  Chuang and Seaton will describe what data is available, how to obtain access, within bounds set by FERPA, and illustrate some of the richness and potential of the data.

Daniel Seaton, Ph.D. is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Professor David Pritchard‘s RELATE physics education research group at MIT. With a primary interest in online education, his work involves a combination of learning analytics, educational data mining, and content development in physics education. His current research focuses on analyzing student behavior in online homework systems, working heavily with data from the LON-CAPA course management system. Dr. Seaton has active projects analyzing student e-text use and time-based measures of learning, and is currently analyzing data from 6.002x, the first course offering from the edX initiative. He has also been involved with teaching at MIT, specifically, RELATE’s mechanics reform course offered during IAP.

Isaac Chuang is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, jointly appointed in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and in the Physics. He is also co-founding Associate Director of ODL (Office of Digital Learning)He leads the quanta research group at the Center for Ultracold Atoms, in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. This group seeks to understand and create information technology and intelligence from the fundamental building blocks of physical systems, atoms and molecules.His  research interests include: The Physics of Information & Computation, Information Theory & Cryptography, and Ultrcold Trapped ions & molecules. He co-author a textbook on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. He is also on the editorial board of the Virtual Journal of Quantum Information. Recent student theses. 

Chuang and Seaton's talk promises to be of value to anyone interested in the educational research opportunities that MOOCs offer, both as resources for better understanding of learning processess as well as strategies to improve pedagogy. We hope you'll join us on Nov 21 at 1:30 in room 66-154. Refreshments will be served.