A cross-departmental team from CEHD is one of 33 nationwide—and the only from the U or Minnesota—moving forward in the Digital Learning Challenge, a competition to modernize, accelerate, and improve the processes for studying effective learning and education. The competition is run by XPRIZE, a world leader in designing and operating such events to solve humanity’s grand challenges.
Members of CEHD X Team include John Behr (Educational Technology Innovations), Bodong Chen (Department of Curriculum and Instruction), Clay Cook (Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development), Kim Gibbons (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement), Panayiota (Pani) Kendeou and Kristen McMaster (Department of Educational Psychology), Frank Symons (CEHD Associate Dean of Research), and Ryan Warren (Innovation and Partnership Officer).
The Digital Learning Challenge incentivizes the use of AI methods, big data, and machine learning to better understand practices that support educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the tens of millions of Americans enrolled in formal education every year. The experiments conducted for the challenge will build understanding of educational processes that are working well and ones that need to be improved to achieve better outcomes.
A judging panel of experts is now reviewing the registered teams’ technical submissions and will determine which teams will move on to the pilot study phase of the challenge. Competitors include educational institutions like CEHD and also individuals, for-profit companies, 501(c)(3) private foundations, and public charities from across the country. Meet the judges.
“We’re encouraged to see so many teams coming from different backgrounds and sectors to work toward improving something as essential to society as how people learn,” said Mark Schneider, the director of IES. “By harnessing the ingenuity of these technological innovations we can be several steps closer to closing the achievement gap and improving the educational methods of yesterday.”
For the pilot study, teams will have six months to demonstrate the capabilities of their systems in an accredited education institutional setting and then 30 days to launch a replication study with at least one unique learner demographic. Top teams will build systems to conduct rapid, reproducible experiments and demonstrate the educational infrastructure in a formal learning context. The final experiments must be replicated at least five times within 30 days with three or more distinct demographics. The winner of the competition will receive a grand prize of up to $1 million.
