Data Science in Education

Dear attendees and members,

We are excited to announce that Prof. Ryan Baker, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics will be presenting on Monday June 20.

The event is sponsored by and will be hosted at McGraw-Hill Education. We will have pizza and beer.

Summary:

In the last decades, the power of data mining and analytics has transformed practice in field after field. In this talk, Prof. Baker will discuss how this trend is playing out in education. Increasingly, large-scale data is available on students, whether from school information systems, large-scale field observational methods, or the logs of online learning systems. Much of this data represents student behavior in a fashion that is both longitudinal and fine-grained. This has allowed researchers to model and track many elements of student learning that were not previously feasible at scale: engagement, affect, meta-cognition, collaborative skill, and robust learning. In turn, these models can be used in prediction of long-term student outcomes, and in early interventions for at-risk students.

In this talk, Ryan will discuss how the methods of educational data mining draw from broader trends in data science, and some of the problems and methods more specific to education research. Throughout the talk, Ryan will both discuss the current state of the art in educational data mining, and some of the key research challenges and opportunities for data scientists working in this emerging area.

Speaker Bio:

Ryan Baker is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics. His lab conducts research on engagement and robust learning within online and blended learning, seeking to find actionable indicators that can be used today but which predict future student outcomes. Baker has developed models that can automatically detect student engagement in over a dozen online learning environments, and has led the development of an observational protocol and app for field observation of student engagement that has been used by over 150 researchers in 4 countries. He was the founding president of the International Educational Data Mining Society, is currently serving as Associate Editor of three journals, and the first technical director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, the world's largest public repository for data on the interactions between learners and online learning environments. Baker has co-authored published papers with over 250 colleagues.

Agenda:

6:00 pm - 6:30 pm socialize and grab pizza and drinks

6:30 pm - 7:30 pm presentation and questions

7:30 pm - 8:00 pm wrap up