Online Learning with Courseware and Virtual Labs

Speaker
Richard Scheines
Professor, Philosophy Department, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Improving online learning is a major challenge for HCI. Although hundreds of small lab studies have contributed to understanding which properties of an educational presentation on the computer seem to improve learning, few whole courses have been instrumented and used to assess how student behaviors relate to learning outcomes. I will present an online course that has been so instrumented, and show how the course’s interactivity is crucial in promoting learning. Another large area of online learning research involves “virtual labs,” environments within which students can explore complicated domains like aqueous chemistry or economic markets or causal research in social science. I will present the Causality Lab, and show the results of pilot studies aimed at finding where student’s need help in causal discovery tasks.

Speaker's Bio

Professor Scheines received his Ph.d in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, and joined the faculty in Philosophy in 1990. His research has focused on the connection between statistical evidence and causal claims, and on educational computing. In addition to his appointment in Philosophy, he is a member of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and is the director of the undergraduate major in HCI.