Learn more about Learning Engineering in the following video series.
1) An Overview of Learning Engineering
In this video, Kumar Garg, managing director at Schmidt Futures, will explain what learning engineering is and why it’s so important to safely collect data, analyze data, and iterate based on what you learn. As Garg notes, learning engineering requires us to humbly admit that we don’t know everything there is to know about how students learn. But at the same time, he argues that educators can do a lot to learn about learning! When individuals think from a learning engineering perspective, you’re constantly planning systematic ways to test your own assumptions about how your tool works and then making changes based on what you learn.
2) The Practice of Learning Engineering
In this video, Ryan Baker, professor of education and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics, will explain some of the common methods learning engineers use in practice. This includes a deeper look into the types of questions that can be asked and answered using educational data. He’ll also give an overview of some of the ways this data is collected and analyzed and some of the terms commonly used in learning engineering. He also explains the differences between learning engineering and other related fields such as learning science and educational technology.
3) The Challenges of Learning Engineering
Diane Litman is a computer science professor, a senior scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center, and faculty of the Intelligent Systems Program all at the University of Pittsburgh. In this video, she highlights some of the challenges that are common to encounter in learning engineering. She talks about concerns for student privacy, the ethics of good research design, and considerations of bias in machine learning algorithms.
4) Case Study: Talking Points
Talking Points is a platform that allows for student families, teachers, and administrators to communicate with each other in their own native languages through human and AI-enabled two-way translation. In this video, Heejae Lim, Talking Points’ founder and CEO, explains how the company thinks about both enabling outside researchers to conduct their research more easily using their platform and using their own data internally to better understand how parent-teacher-administrator communications affect and reflect student learning.
5) UpGrade, a Carnegie Learning A/B Testing Tool
In this video, April Murphy, a learning engineer at Carnegie Learning, gives an overview of Carnegie Learning’s tool, UpGrade. UpGrade is an open-source web-based platform for A/B testing in education. UpGrade allows researchers to compare the efficacy of different learning resources such as videos, tests, texts, algorithms, and more, all with the goal of better understanding – and thus improving – student learning.
