Boston Big Data for Education Meeting, February 16

Thank you to everyone who had attended our community meeting of the Northeast Big Data for Education Spoke.

Location & Time:

The meeting was held on February 16, 2018 at the MIT Office of Open Learning, at 600 Technology Square, Cambridge MA .

General Description:

MIT's Dr. Justin Reich gave the morning keynote, while afternoon activities included a workshop on the Co-Design Lab: the 2018 Learning Analytics Challenge led by George Mu and a tutorial on Educational Data Mining taught by Dr. Amy Nurnberger and Dr. Ryan Baker.

In addition, to these activities, our team had announced the winners of our 1st Big Data in Education Competition, and facilitated community-building activities, including opportunities for discussion on potential collaborations with other meeting participants.

Schedule for February 16, 2018:

9:00 Welcoming Statements by Beverly Woolf

9:15 Keynote Address by Justin Reich

Using Educational Data to Better Predict Long Term Educational Outcomes

10:15 Coffee break

10:30 Big Data in Education Competitions (Neil Heffernan & Ryan Baker)

Releasing of the results of the educational data mining competition.

10:45 Speed Dating for Data Research

One of our networking activities included a speed-dating activity that everybody had participated in. (Here is who signed up).

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Workshop with George Mu OR Tutorial with Amy Nurnberger & Ryan Baker

Co-Design Lab: the 2018 Learning Analytics Challenge (w/ George Mu)

In 2017, Boston Public Schools awarded a prize to a team from MIT for developing an optimized bus network that would save the district $3-5M a year in transportation costs. This open challenge demonstrated the power of analytics in solving pressing, immediate, and complex challenges facing our education system.

This was a design thinking lab, where we had convened a group of leading analytics academics and professionals with school system leaders to identify the next problem space for the 2018 Learning Analytics Challenge. Participants collectively identified and selected the most promising areas of opportunity for analytics to drive real-world impact in our PK-12 systems.

Tutorial in Educational Data Mining Methods (w/Amy Nurnberger & Ryan Baker)

In this session, Amy Nurnberger, Program Head, Data Management Services at MIT, had discussed modern tools and practices for managing and working with large-scale educational data, and Ryan Baker of the University of Pennsylvania lead a discussion on current core methods and applications for educational data mining methods.

2:30 Coffee break

4:00 Day ends