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Professor Ryan Baker of the University of Pennsylvania will speak at this colloquium in the auditorium of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. The College of Education is co-sponsoring the talk.

A 10:15 reception will take place prior to Baker's talk.

Abstract: Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have been viewed as a potentially powerful source for research on learning and student success, but research on MOOCs has largely been fragmentary, with most research conducted on single MOOCs, and limited work towards formally studying which findings replicate across courses. In this paper, we present an architecture to facilitate replication of research on learning and behavior within MOOCs. This architecture can ingest data from an edX Massive Open Online Course and test whether a range of findings apply, in their original form or slightly modified using an automated search process. We identify 15 findings from previously published studies on completion in MOOCs, render them into production rules within our architecture, and test them across 29 MOOC instances, using a post-hoc method to control for multiple comparisons. I will discuss which findings replicate and which findings replicate in reverse. We are currently working to extend this replication to over 60 MOOCs. This work represents a step towards automated replication of correlational research findings at large scale.

Sponsor: National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the College of Education