New England Board of Higher Education's Commission on Higher Education & Employability has thought hard over the past year about the increasing role of artificial intelligence and robotics in the future of life and work. Many others are also waking up to this landscape, which not so long ago seemed like science fiction. Machines have changed…

Learning analytics research has used both knowledge engineering and machine learning methods to model student behaviors within the context of digital learning environments. In this paper, we compare these two approaches, as well as a hybrid approach combining the two types of methods. We illustrate the strengths of each approach in the context of…

Using data to understand learning and improve education has great promise. However, the promise will not be achieved simply by AI and Machine Learning researchers developing innovative models that more accurately predict labeled data. As AI advances, modeling techniques and the models they produce are getting increasingly complex, often involving…

Tips offered center on classroom discourse, curriculum choices, and potential assignments. In this article, we present tips for creating a thriving undergraduate and graduate communication research lab. Based on our experiences developing and co-directing the Communication and Social Robotics Labs (CSRLs), we offer 10 best practices for acquiring…

As social science fiction, this paper imagines three possible futures for education and technology. Among the most important technologies emerging today are data-aggregating technologies such as AI, affective computing, adaptive or predictive software, clouds and platforms. The paper is not, however, directed at specific technologies, but at…

This paper reports on progress in the development of a teaching module on machine learning with decision trees for secondary-school students, in which students use survey data about media use to predict who plays online games frequently. This context is familiar to students and provides a link between school and everyday experience. In this…

The sudden, unexpected breakthrough in the intelligence shown by machines, as a wished for, but very disruptive element, will shape the future of our civilisation and Humans as individuals and collectives. The extreme drive towards commercialisation of newest developments already led to an extremely wide spread of Machine Intelligence Assistants…

Recent advances in computational linguistics and the social sciences have created new opportunities for the education research community to analyze relevant large-scale text data. However, the take-up of these advances in education research is still nascent. In this article, we review the recent automated text methods relevant to educational…

Recent advances in computational linguistics and the social sciences have created new opportunities for the education research community to analyze relevant large-scale text data. However, the take-up of these advances in education research is still nascent. In this article, we review the recent automated text methods relevant to educational…

In this article, a cognitive framework for observing learning activities based on human-computer coupling is proposed. The observation is based on the vectorization of a learning situation along with human-computer interaction factors. An evolutionary high-dimensional topology of learning cognitive flow is introduced for human-computer…

In order to use dialogue systems for computer assisted second-language learning systems, one of the difficult issues in such systems is how to construct large-scale dialogue knowledge that matches the dialogue modelling of a dialogue system. This paper describes how we have accomplished the short-term construction of large-scale and…

The application of Machine Learning (ML) tools to a wide range of problems from image recognition to movie recommendations is increasing rapidly. After a brief overview of ML, select ML tools are demonstrated through the analysis of student grades in various chemical engineering courses. ML tools are shown to help in the identification of…

In this paper, we report the scientific experience of HELMeTO 2020, the second edition of the International Workshop on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online, held virtually in Bari (Italy) in September 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The call received 59 proposals from nine countries, 39 papers were accepted to…

We propose a crowdsourcing-based framework to iteratively and rapidly bootstrap a dialog system from scratch for a new domain. We leverage the open-source modular HALEF dialog system to deploy dialog applications. We illustrate the usefulness of this framework using four different prototype dialog items with applications in the educational domain…

The rapid developments today in artificial intelligence (AI), supported by massive language data collection, are resulting in ever better digital language assistance/translation. Advances in the capabilities of intelligent services lead naturally to envisioning a future where there might be a quite different context for second language (L2) use…