Massive Online Open Courses provide an excellent opportunity to study how people learn. ALFA believes that student interactions with the learning material can be modeled, allowing researchers to mine this data and make discoveries that will inform best practices. The project aims to build a state space model from sources like MITx and study which interactions contribute most to student learning. From this, creators can learn how to design better MOOCs by discovering, for example, the optimal schedule for releasing videos or the most effective methods of reinforcing material.

I have taken Professor Tommi Jaakkola’s undergraduate class on Machine Learning. I have also participated in online courses from a range of providers on topics as varied as AI, Finance, Natural Language Processing, and Operations Management.