We envision a future in which students, teachers, and AI work together in newly-designed partnerships to co-orchestrate and support personalized learning. Students carry out a dynamic, personalized mix of individual and collaborative learning activities, aimed to help them learn at many levels: They develop skills and knowledge at the domain level, become better at regulating their learning and collaborating with peers, and develop their own personal motivation to learn. They receive guidance not just from the AI and the teacher but also from each other.
As we work towards realizing this vision, we collaborate with teachers, students, and other stakeholders. In many activities, we work to understand their needs, preferences and boundaries. We design, prototype, and pilot-test new technologies with them. We investigate how the new technologies we create affect educational processes and outcomes in real educational settings. Although the work focuses often on middle-school mathematics, the technologies work in other task domains as well. We give examples of technologies we have created to support our vision of the dynamic learning environment of the future.
We face many open questions. To name just a few: How can individual and collaborative learning best be balanced and supported? How can learning self-regulatory skill be balanced with domain-level learning? How can we best support teachers and students in authoring their own AI-based tutoring software?
We also face new open questions, brought to the foreground by the Covid-19 pandemic: In the new educational scenarios that have arisen, what challenges do K-12 teachers face regarding student self-regulation, motivation and connectedness? How do teachers monitors their students' learning, communicate with students, and give timely feedback? How can co-orchestration tools originally designed for classroom use be adjusted to blended or online scenarios?
We are looking for schools and teachers who might be interested in jointly exploring how to develop new, dynamic learning environments that leverage complementary strenghts of humans and AI. If interested in joining the research or to use our technologies for free, please feel to reach out.