HAI Weekly Seminar with Mitchell Stevens

The embrace of massively open online courses (MOOCs) by Harvard, MIT and Stanford from 2012-2014 created buzz and anxiety among educators worldwide. While many were quick to thereafter declare the failure of MOOCs as instructional technologies, their legacy continues to transform the landscape of educational research. MOOCs demonstrated that minute instructional interactions could be observed and experimentally instrumented at scale; lured substantial new talent to educational inquiry from the burgeoning fields of data science and machine learning; dramatically expanded what counts as an instructional environment; and abetted the flow of private capital into a burgeoning sector now called “learning.” In this talk I synthesize recent scholarship to frame the promise and risks attendant to pursuit of learning research in digitally mediated environments.