ReadWriteWeb posted an article covering an infographic compiled by Knewton, a marker of test prep software. See the infographic below. Compelling evidence that digital education is growing rapidly.
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
Aug 182011
Tutor Technologies, Inc., is one of four companies selected to pilot the Tepper-Innovation Works Agile Innovation program. The program has been funded by a prestigious $1 million i6 Challenge grant, awarded jointly to the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business and Innovation Works. The i6 Challenge is administered by the US Economic Development Administration and the US Department of Commerce and is designed to “identify and support the nation’s best ideas for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.”
As a pilot member of the program, Tutor Technologies will work with Tepper and Innovation Works to implement innovative lean startup methods, including SCRUM and other agile business and development processes. Seed funding will also be provided to support customer-facing activities that improve products and services.
Last weekend Christy McGuire and I attended the CE21 organizational meeting in New Orleans. We were invited as potential PI’s in anticipation of submitting a grant for the upcoming April deadline. The meeting was excellent, bringing together educational researchers (who may or may not have much experience with CS) and CS faculty (who may not have a wealth of knowledge about rigorous educational research). I was more familiar with the CS faculty and many of the conversations we had were about the social science and education science research that I have learned about in my PhD studies at CMU.
I thought I would share a short list of resources that I could direct the network to in order to help CS faculty learn about some of the language of education research and also give them a starting point in theory. So here are my favorite education science resources:
IES Practice Guides: This is a great place to start for anyone looking for research proven methods in an easy to read format. The IES is the Institute for Education Sciences and they are the research arm of the US department of education. The practice guides span a variety of topics and offer a good starting point for evidenced-based practice.
PSLC Theory Wiki: The PSLC (Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center) offers a wiki of learning theories that is slowly being populated. A large amount is already filled in, but be aware that it is a work in progress. I suggest going to the Cognitive Factors Thrust link on the left and starting there.
Hopefully this helps out those of you looking for some easy to understand education research links. Please contact us if you need any other help or are looking for any particular resources and I’ll see what I can do.
The IES has released a guide (available via this page) for using data in the classroom that is a must-read for teachers and researchers. As a statistician who is passionate about improving education, it is exciting to envision the many ways in which a intelligent tutoring system (ITS) can help to reach these goals (and particularly the first two, which are aimed at the individual and classroom level). An in-class tutoring system has the potential to serve two complimentary roles — one as a source of highly-focused, individualized instruction; and the other as an instrument allowing educators and administrators to gain detailed insight into students’ progress, strengths, and weaknesses.
An online ITS is uniquely able to implement the suggested cycle of 1) collecting/preparing learning data, 2) interpreting data/forming hypotheses for improvement, and 3) modifying instruction to test hypotheses. By drawing on learning data which are broad (across many students, classes, schools, curricula) and deep (within particular students), such a tutor can detect subtle differences or find striking commonalities in learning patterns — in ways that would be impossible without access to such a dataset. By constantly analyzing these data and updating the tutor’s content to reflect current findings and best-known practices, a team of experts in computer science education, educational data mining, and cognitive tutoring can create an immensely effective and always up-to-date tool for teaching CS and computational thinking, while helping to advance the state of understanding of these subjects and how best to approach teaching them.
I could go on here about how, e.g., an ITS is a great platform for formative assessment, showing students their progress & giving the control over learning goals & outcomes… or how a properly-designed and -executed system could even be an exemplar to educators and administrators of the benefits of data-driven education, promoting a”data-driven culture”… but you get the idea. In short: I’m very excited & optimistic about what our little team is doing here. As our ideals & goals become clearer, as we brainstorm the ways in which we’ll approach attaining them, and as we begin to implement our first actual product, the feeling that we’re doing the right thing at the right time just gets stronger….
Jan 212011
Alfred Thompson makes a compelling case for using IDE’s in computer science education. While conceding that modern IDE’s such as Visual Studio and Eclipse may be “a bit too complicated for many high school students (and their instructors)”, he argues persuasively that an IDE can accelerate learning by making beginners successful.
An IDE helps make beginners successful by making things they don’t need right away invisible and allows students to focus on logic, problem solving and the specifics of the first programming languages. IDEs also support powerful debugging tools which makes fixing problems faster and easier.
The reason that there is debate at all is simply because teachers face the unfortunate choice between a set of poor options.
Rather than simply choosing between integration or not, our students should interact with an intelligent learning environment that has the flexibility to scaffold the integration of code-building tools as required by the learning objectives and the student’s state of knowledge. A learning environment modeled after the success of Intelligent Tutoring Systems in other domains such as mathematics, and employing modern research from learning and cognitive sciences has the potential to greatly enhance student outcomes and enjoyment.
While it is certainly useful for educators to talk about what existing tools to use given their requirements, let’s not stop there. We need to supplement the To IDE or Not To IDE choice with the myriad of immediate and differentiated choices that an intelligently scaffolded development environment can make. We are studying those choices within such a framework, and I would love to have a conversation about how our education requirements impact the tools we can build, tools that are deliberately designed from the ground up to support computer science education.
The market for educational interventions is changing. In the 20th century the textbook and workbook ruled all. Each classroom had a textbook for each child, often supplemented with workbooks or worksheets that allowed for practice that could be easily(for that time) collected and graded by the teacher. In the article “6 Predictions for Education in 2011” posted online by Forbes, 5 of the six predictions emphasize the importance of online content for students.
But just as textbooks and workbooks started offering more features to students and teachers in order to compete in the educational marketplace, smart online companies will also look to add benefit for their content and courses over the generic.
The education space has become enamoured by data. A fact echoed by the release of a new practice guide by the US Department of Education about using data in the classroom which we will talk about later. Smart online interventions will not only provide teachers with data about their students, as content management systems like Moodle and Blackboard already do, but will use that data in intelligent ways to help guide the students to optimum learning experiences.
The question is not what information an online course or system provide, but what learning experience can be ehnanced by the addition of such a system to an educational setting. Then not only are we meeting the economic needs of the school budget, but also the learning needs of its students.
Mark Guzdial, Alfred Thompson, and the CSTA recently put forth a call for more research on why computer science education is important for K-12. As Tutor Technologies has been making this argument for the past few months in grant and funding applications, we would like to share our thoughts.
(1) Addressing Modern Standards -
Mark talks about the need to understand how computer science transfers to other domains, and we have a slightly different perspective. Other domains are now asking for computer science. Both the Common Core math standards and the recommended science standards talk about the need for modeling and simulation as a part of the discipline. At Tutor Technologies, we are working on an intelligent tutoring system for Computational Thinking (link) that will help students learn the computer science concepts they need in order to address these modern standards for the 21st century student.
(2) Providing a Full Toolbox -
21st century students need 21st century skills, and the ability to reason with computational devices is an important part of that skill set. Computational thinking and computer science can help provide students the tools they need to extract information from data, simulate or model situations to make informed predications or decisions, and streamline their work process to be competitive. For all of these reasons we believe that computational thinking and computer science is an important tool for every child’s toolbox.
21st century students need 21st century skills, and the ability to reason with computational devices is an important part of that skill set. Computational thinking and computer science can help provide students the tools they need to extract information from data, simulate or model situations to make informed predications or decisions, and streamline their work process to be competitive. For all of these reasons we believe that computational thinking and computer science is an important tool for every child’s toolbox.
Overall, Tutor Technologies is working to provide a pedagogical tool that will help both teachers and students achieve competency in computer science and computational thinking using proven and newly discovered cognitive principles in our tutor design.
Follow us on twitter @tutor_tech and subscribe to our news feed, or contact us for more information.
Jan 042011
We have relocated to the AlphaLab offices on Pittsburgh’s historic and vibrant South Side, on one of the largest Victorian main streets in America.
Dec 172010
Tutor Technologies is honored to have been selected in a competitive national selection process by Innovation Works for seed funds and participation in the AlphaLab Winter/Spring 2011 Program. Innovation Works is an excellent and active seed-stage tech start-up incubator supported in part by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
