The Learning Observer

A Prototype Platform for the Integration of Learning Data

July 12, 2024 workshop at AIED 2024 in Recife, Brazil.

In this tutorial workshop, we will introduce The Learning Observer. This is a project whose goal is to set up an open, transparently-governed consortium to manage student data in the interest of students and the general public. The open-source platform we are developing for this is at a prototype stage, but is designed to permit the integration of diverse learning data, use of sophisticated machine learning techniques over that data, and the presentation of real-time teacher dashboards. We are architecting it to support open-science and SEER-aligned research methodology.

We are at an early enough stage that we can still make major changes. The key goal of this workshop is to:

• Give participants an overview of the problems we are trying to solve and a high level view of issues, and surface frictions and tradeoffs.
• Provide an overview of our planned approach.
• Collect your feedback on how to improve our approach so we can better support your work.
• Perhaps, find areas of future collaboration.

This workshop will be structured as:

• Morning 1 and 2: Policy segment: How do we structure this as a consortium going forward, to make sure we maintain transparency, support for diverse populations, accountability, and act in the student interest? This will be structured as a double-jigsaw
• Afternoon 1: Technology segment An overview of what we’re building, a deep dive into how we’re architecting it, and collect feedback on how to make it useful to a broad set of AIED projects (hopefully, leading to future partnerships; we’d love to get to a consortium).
• Afternoon 2: Either continuation of Afternoon 1, or a design workshop, depending on how far we made it.

The sessions are independent (you can come to one, the other, or both), but related. The morning session is the motivation for the afternoon session.

After the sessions, please fill out our outtake survey.