DANCE: Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange

Drawing from two decades of research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), we are working to design an extension of the edX platform to enhance instructionally beneficial discussion opportunities available to students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This effort, directed by president elect Carolyn Rose and co-directed by Oliver Ferschke will initially focus on edX in particular, but in the long run we seek to provide these capabilities to MOOCs and other online learning platforms more generally. In particular, this working group will partner with edX as a satellite collaborative, seeking to involve researchers and developers from multiple universities, foundations, and industrial organizations.

Currently we are organizing this working group in order to identify who is interested in contributing and in what ways. We are also seeking to build a common vision regarding what kinds of research people would be valuable to the community once such a platform extension was in place to support it. Our vision includes text, speech, and video based interactions, instrumented with all sorts of intelligent support powered by state-of-the-art analytics and leveraging language technologies and artificial intelligence more broadly in order to offer contextually appropriate support. We will coordinate this effort with regular online meetings and occasional in person working meetings. We welcome you to partner with us. Sign up to get involved at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/DANCE.html. Feel free to direct questions to the DANCE Co-Director, Oliver Ferschke, at [email protected].