Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange

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= DANCE is a research project at CMU

Description

Carolyn Penstein Rosé et al.:

"Drawing from two decades of research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), we are working to design an extension of the edX platform to enhance instructionally beneficial discussion opportunities available to students. Our work will initially focus on EdX in particular, but in the long run we seek to provide these capabilities to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other online learning platforms more generally. In particular, this working group will partner with edX as a satellite collaborative, seeking to involve researchers and developers from multiple universities, foundations, and industrial organizations. Currently we are organizing this working group in order to identify who is interested in contributing and in what ways. We are also seeking to build a common vision regarding what kinds of research people would be valuable to the community once such a platform extension was in place to support it. There will be a wide variety of roles to play once this working group is formed, including but not limited to vision setting, prototyping and more industrial strength software development, integration, etc. The long term vision is to produce a production quality extension to the platform.

Our foundational work is beginning with specific interventions designed to offer synchronous collaboration activities supported by intelligent conversational agents and enhancements to threaded discussions to support more intensive help exchange by leveraging social recommendation technology. However, our goals are much broader than this, seeking to leverage insights and methodologies from the field of Human-Computer Interaction and encompassing both synchronous and asynchronous communication very broadly. Our vision includes text, speech, and video based interactions, instrumented with all sorts of intelligent support powered by state-of-the-art analytics and leveraging language technologies and artificial intelligence more broadly in order to offer contextually appropriate support. We will coordinate this effort with regular online meetings and occasional in person working meetings." (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/DANCE.html)