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EdTech Shares HCII Tool That Helps Make Online Courses More Social

In the Media

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Why are community college students in online classes 4% more likely than their high-performing peers to drop out? This is what Barbara Illowsky, a mathematics professor and chief academic affairs officer at DeAnza College, wanted to know. The drop out rate for online classes climbs 2% over traditional classes, leading DeAnza and five other California community colleges to address a major difference between the two types of learning environments: social interaction, according to a recent article in EdTech.

The colleges decided to pilot a tool to help improve social interaction and collaboration between students in online classes. The tool they chose, Bazaar, was developed at Carnegie Mellon University by a research team led by Carolyn Rosé, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Language Technologies Institute.

Read more about the community colleges' pilot with Bazaar on EdTech.