Professor Carolyn Rosé is a Professor of Language Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Interim Director of the Language Technologies Institute. Her research program focuses on computational modeling of discourse to enable scientific understanding the social and pragmatic nature of conversational interaction of all forms, and using this understanding to build intelligent computational systems for improving collaborative interactions. She is best known for her work on dynamic support of collaborative learning using intelligent conversational agents in online, face-to-face, and hybrid settings, triggered through real time analysis of conversational interactions. Her research group's highly interdisciplinary work, published in 280 peer reviewed publications, is represented in the top venues of 5 fields: namely, Language Technologies, Learning Sciences, Cognitive Science, Educational Technology, and Human-Computer Interaction, with awards in 4 of these fields. She is a Past President and Inaugural Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, Senior member of IEEE, Founding Chair of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. She also serves as a 2020-2021 AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Fellow for Public Engagement with Science, with a focus on public engagement with Artificial Intelligence.
This talk explores the costs and benefits of social interaction in online communities, what we have learned about what works, what can be done with technology, and what questions we still need to answer. In particular, this talk highlights social analytics as an area of Artificial Intelligence that plays a role in supporting education that has featured in movements towards large scale learning opportunities, such as promised in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as in more traditional Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning environments. It will review the history of the rise and fall of the MOOCs in connection with developments in AI in Education that contribute to the broader landscape of online learning at scale as well as illustrating the important role of social support in the success of such endeavors. It further discusses how social analytic technologies have played a role in providing, monitoring, and intensifying such experiences. As an illustration, it will cover a recent full scale deployment study of computer-supported collaborative learning as a key part of an onboarding activity in a fully online university setting. In this study, the powerful experience of a single synchronous activity with another student on the platform significantly increased the probability of a student enrolling in and completing at least one course within 60 days of the activity.