Apr 05 2013DataShop 6.2 released!

DataShop 6.2 released - upload datasets, project access enhancements, and more

With today's update to DataShop, we've made another big step toward allowing you to import datasets directly. You can now upload a file to be imported into DataShop, as well as create and manage projects and files-only datasets. All progress on the import of your datasets will be shown in the Import Queue at the top of My Datasets.

Upload datasets

Two new items in the main navigation under My Data—Upload a dataset and Create a project—allow you to get started adding new data to DataShop. You can create a dataset with or without transaction data. Transaction data is data that is in either of the two formats DataShop accepts (XML and tab-delimited). More info about these formats can be found in our help.

After you upload a dataset with transaction data, you'll see it in the new Import Queue on the My Datasets page. Information about the file format verification and import status (such as estimated import date) will be show in the queue and emailed to you.

Manage project access directly

On each project page in DataShop you'll see an updated Permissions tab. If you are a project admin for that project, you can now see the list of people who have access to your project, modify that access, and grant access to new users directly by entering their username (in addition to responding to requests for access). An access report for that project is also available.

New "condition" column in the student-problem export

The "condition" column is now also included in the student-problem export, in addition to the transaction and student-step exports.

Access Report optimizations

The Access Report, which shows who has accessed your projects and what their permissions are, has been optimized to be much faster. You can view the main Access Report on the Access Requests page.

More Information

Jan 24 2013DataShop 6.1 released!

DataShop 6.1 released - new navigation, error bars, improved project pages, and more

Revised home page and navigation

The latest version of DataShop has a new navigation section along the left-hand side of the application. We've grouped together things that are specific to your account—your datasets, access requests, and profile—under the heading My Data. My Datasets now appears under this heading, while Public Datasets and Private Datasets (renamed from Other Datasets) appear under the heading Explore. We have also removed the login box in favor of the login page. (To log in, just click the "Log in" button.)

Error Bars in Learning Curves

Turn on error bars on a learning curve by clicking the "Error Bars" checkbox in the navigation. You can choose between error bars that represent one standard deviation or one standard error.

New project pages and subtabs

A project in DataShop is a way to group together datasets and specify who has permissions to those datasets. In this release, the project page has new fields for a project description (what are these datasets about?), tags (words describing the project or its data), and external links (links to a research page, wiki, or anything else). You can view your current permission level for a project from the new "Permissions" subtab. "Terms of Use" has been moved to its own subtab.

With this new project page, more information will be capable of being captured and indexed, making pages more intelligible to both researchers and Google search.

Revised permissions

In addition the the existing project access levels of "edit" and "view", we've added a third—"admin". A project admin has full control over a project and its datasets. This role will be even more useful when we've added the ability to upload datasets. We've created a table to show the difference between the three roles. As of this release, if you were a PI for a project, you are now also its admin.

IRB management

Another addition to the project page is a subtab called "IRB" (visible if you are the project admin for a project). When you add a dataset to DataShop, you must complete a few steps on the IRB subtab of your project page. These requirements, specified in the latest IRB for DataShop and on our help page, apply to all datasets added to DataShop after April 2012. Included in these are requirements for what you must do before being allowed to use DataShop to share data outside of your immediate research team. More information about this process is available on our help page.

Change to Performance Profiler controls

We've added controls for changing the X and Y axes to the navigation area. The existing controls, which can be accessed by positioning your cursor over the X and Y axis labels, are still available.

Tweaks to access requests and the access report

We made the following changes related to access requests and the access report:

• We fixed a bug that was prompting users to agree to project terms for projects they didn't have access to but were only browsing.
• New columns in the exportable access report show more information about the last action of the data provider, PI, or DataShop admin.
• If a project has both a PI and data provider and one of the two approves access, the PI or data provider that responded will not be notified again if the user re-requests access, nor will she be asked to approve access again.
• A PI or data provider responding to a request for access can now choose to share the reason they enter with the requester. This is the default, as most people were using this feature as if the text they entered was being sent to the requester.

More Information

Jan 21 2013The Cross-Linguistic Study of Reading Acquisition Workshop co-hosted by Charles Perfetti

Charles Perfetti co-hosted a workshop on the The Cross-Linguistic Study of Reading Acquisition held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Co-hosted by Ludo Verhoeven of the Radbout University of Nijmegen, the workshop brought together researchers who represented 17 different languages and their writing systems to examine how learning to read is similar and different across these languages and writing systems.

More Information

Jan 17 2013NIPS Tutorial on Machine Learning for Student Learning

NIPS Tutorial on Machine Learning for Student Learning was held December 03, 2012 and was conducted by Emma Brunskill and Geoffrey J Gordon.

Intelligent tutoring systems and online classes have the potential to revolutionize education. Realizing this potential requires tackling a large number of challenges that can be framed as machine learning problems. We will first provide a survey of several machine learning problems in education, such as modeling a student's thought process as she solves a problem, constructing the atoms of knowledge, and automated problem design. We will then discuss cognitive modeling and instructional policy construction in more depth, and describe state-of-the-art methods as well as ongoing challenges. Throughout the tutorial we will highlight where student learning results in opportunities for new algorithmic and theoretical advances in machine learning.

More Information

Jan 17 2013Strong LearnLab presence at NIPS Workshop: Personalizing education with machine learning

Strong LearnLab presence at the NIPS Workshop: Personalizing education with machine learning.

Emma Brunskill gave an invited talk Pedagogical Activity Selection: Drawing Insight From Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty

José González-Brenes presented his poster Topical HMMs for Factorization of Input-Output Sequential Data

Nan Li presented here poster Automated Creation Of Intelligent Tutoring To Support Personalized Online Learning Richard Scheines gave a talk on Machine Learning, Causal Model Search, and Educational Data LearnLab Alums April Galyardt, Andrew Ng, Min Chi, and Norma Ming, Richard Scheines also presented talks.

More Information

Dec 14 2012Blog Post About MS LSE!

Another blogger posted about the new Learning Science and Engineering Masters Program. Click the link below to see more:

More Information

Dec 10 2012OLI and LearnLab presentation at House of Representatives

Nice video at the house of representatives given on the emerging field of science of learning. Speakers included Jared Cohen, Martha Kanter, Ken Koedinger, and Candace Thille.

More Information

Nov 07 2012Ilya Goldin Co-Edits Journal of Writing Research

Ilya Goldin Co-Edits a special issue of the Journal of Writing Research. He also published a new paper in the same journal. The reference and link to the paper are below.

Ilya M. Goldin & Kevin D. Ashley, Eliciting formative assessment in peer review, Journal of Writing Research 4(2), 203-237.

http://www.jowr.org/Ccount/click.php?id=56

The special issues focused on Redesigning educational peer review interactions using computer tools with guest editors Christian D. Schunn, Kevin D. Ashley, & Ilya M. Goldin

Click the link below to see the issue.

More Information

Nov 05 2012Ken Koedinger on Big Data in Education Panel

Ken Koedinger was on panel at Strata conference on Big Data in Education entitled:
'Data Exponential' - K-12 Learning Analytics for Personalized Learning at Scale: Opportunities and Challenges

Click the link to find the full list of speakers at the conference.

More Information

Oct 26 2012Vincent to become co-editor of Int'l Journal of AI in Education.

Congratulations to Vincent Aleven who was named co-editor of International Journal of AI in Education along with Judy Kay.