It has been about 3 months since I joined LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, I have been working on Relevance algorithms for Lynda. Lynda is a online-learning tool that is used by Campuses, Small and Large scale business to empower students and employees to learn software, creative, and business skills to achieve their personal and professional goals.
Online education has really taken off in the past few years and several people predict that campuses may no longer be necessary. While I still don't know enough about my stance on these predictions, I am really impressed by the amount of research that has already gone into studying learner engagement, retention and the factors that affect it. LinkedIn is uniquely placed in this area as it has so much more structured information compared to other online-education providers like Coursera, Udemy, Edx and SkillSoft. But I am not even worried about LinkedIn's role in this field yet. I am very curious and excited to learn about all the research that has been done by universities in understanding learners. Sadly, the work is widely scattered over journals of Statistics, Machine Learning conferences and Education-Research venues of publication. The goal of this blogpost is to summarize all these venues where such work is published. Another useful exercise (saved for another blogspot) would be to create a taxonomy of research done in this field. In fact, it might already be done. I found this great article about where research in MOOC is headed. I was amazed to see a bunch of papers listed in this article that use LDA, HMM and other machine learning models and analytics tools to make sense of the learner engagement data.
Learning at Scale
Learning Analytics and Knowledge
Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
Among the universities that are doing research on MOOCs, most papers are published from Stanford, UPenn, Harvard, UW-Madison, Simon Fraser University and Open University of Netherlands.
In the following blogposts, I will write more about research in this field
Online education has really taken off in the past few years and several people predict that campuses may no longer be necessary. While I still don't know enough about my stance on these predictions, I am really impressed by the amount of research that has already gone into studying learner engagement, retention and the factors that affect it. LinkedIn is uniquely placed in this area as it has so much more structured information compared to other online-education providers like Coursera, Udemy, Edx and SkillSoft. But I am not even worried about LinkedIn's role in this field yet. I am very curious and excited to learn about all the research that has been done by universities in understanding learners. Sadly, the work is widely scattered over journals of Statistics, Machine Learning conferences and Education-Research venues of publication. The goal of this blogpost is to summarize all these venues where such work is published. Another useful exercise (saved for another blogspot) would be to create a taxonomy of research done in this field. In fact, it might already be done. I found this great article about where research in MOOC is headed. I was amazed to see a bunch of papers listed in this article that use LDA, HMM and other machine learning models and analytics tools to make sense of the learner engagement data.
Learning at Scale
Learning Analytics and Knowledge
Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
Among the universities that are doing research on MOOCs, most papers are published from Stanford, UPenn, Harvard, UW-Madison, Simon Fraser University and Open University of Netherlands.
In the following blogposts, I will write more about research in this field
