The Technology for Effective and Efficient Learning (TEEL) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University focuses on research in learning methods, technology for learning systems, curriculum development, and workforce training. The ultimate goal is to forge a path for lifelong learning and career ever-readiness through innovative bridging of learning between formal education, informal education, and the workplace.

The TEEL Lab develops learning platforms that support learning through discussion and collaboration, focusing on hands-on technology areas such as cloud computing, machine learning, and data science. The target interoperable online learning ecosystem under development by the team is designed to enable effective and efficient learning through iterative and interactive learning coupled with contextualized and timely feedback, and by leveraging social interactions between students as a substantial learning resource.

The lab conducts research studies on student learning and evaluates innovative approaches for incorporating social and interactive learning as a driver for developing cognitive and meta-cognitive skills and motivation. Its work is based on research spanning more than a decade in Computer Science Education, Software Engineering, Learning Sciences, and Language Technologies.

In addition to scientific findings, technical advances, and principles for instructional design, the team’s past research has also produced open source resources to share with the broader community. Specific features of the in-progress LMS-pluggable online course infrastructure is that it enables project-based learning through auto-graded projects that provide contextualized feedback. We also incorporate social learning in the form of project reflection and feedback cycles after each project, timed and role-based online learning exercises and rubric-driven peer code-review.

Members of the TEEL Lab collaborate with other groups at CMU, other universities, community colleges as well as industry. Find out how you can get involved from our Call for Participation.

Funded in part by a grant from Microsoft and grants NSF grants ACI-1443068, IIS 1822831 and IIS 1546393.

The TEEL Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is excited to issue a call for collaboration on the development and deployment of our SAIL Platform and Curriculum. We plan to collaborate with faculty at community colleges on offering a variety of hands-on project-based courses as part of community college course offerings. We focus on curricula, developed by domain experts, that are targeted to the needs of a variety of learners to prepare them for jobs in the domains of cloud computing, machine learning, and data science, with the goal of helping meet the expected job growth in these fields. We prepare learners for these domains by developing foundational skills and providing opportunities to exercise industry’s best practices. This collaboration is meant to influence both the curricular content and its delivery while leveraging the expertise of faculty at community colleges in order to best meet the needs of our target learners in terms of career preparedness and the ability to cope with life-challenges that impact the learners’ ability to engage in a sustained upskilling effort. Mentorship and professional development in the domain will be made available to collaborating faculty.

Our SAIL platform offers content and scaffolded activities within the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) that integrate with Learning Management Systems that are already in use at community colleges. The design builds on an empirical foundation and software infrastructure emerging from our experience of offering online and hands-on project-based courses since 2013 to Carnegie Mellon's global campuses. Our platform offers learn-by-doing projects with scaffolding and opportunities to iterate by using auto-graded projects that provide timely and contextualized feedback. We incorporate social learning reflection and feedback cycles for each project, timed and role-based online group learning exercises and rubric-driven peer code-review opportunities. All of these are industry-standard job-relevant activities further reinforce the connection between the course content and software engineering best practices.

The TEEL Lab hopes to partner with community colleges to collaboratively adapt our existing curricular content to create new offerings or augment existing classes within the community college context. The SAIL Platform and collaboration is an effort to evaluate the efficacy of our innovative learning methods. We also are interested in research endeavors to investigate how to incorporate upskilling as part of a learner's current job.

Call to action:

• Inform us of your interest in this collaboration
• Identify existing programs that our initial cloud computing course offering fits within
• Supply a list of faculty who would be interested in participating in this collaboration
• Work through the IRB process to enable research towards continual improvement of the platform from student data