Finch - Natural selection for online education

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Description

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/knly/finch

We build an A/B-testing framework to tailor online education material to the demographics of the user.

Online education is becoming increasingly accessible to a wide variety of demographics. As a result, it has the potential to create opportunities for those otherwise unable to access it. The newfound diversity of students presents considerable difficulties in ensuring that the educational material is effective for each demographic. To that end we propose to implement an A/B-testing framework that will automatically determine an optimal set of educational materials. The teacher provides variations to their material, as well as tests to determine the student's success. Our A/B-testing based algorithm adjusts the content of the course based on usage statistics and the results of the provided tests.

For example, our project will help refugees to learn the language of their asylum country. These language courses were hardly ever taught to populations with such dissimilar cultural backgrounds. Our framework will choose between various language teaching methods to ensure the quickest and most effective learning for each cultural origin, improving in quality with each user.

We can also apply the same technology to find the most effective explanation of a complicated physics concept based on the student's age, gender, cultural background, etc.

We believe our project can have a significant impact on online education quality.

Goals of the project

- Implement the A/B-testing algorithm

- Build a website prototype that allows teachers to create variations to their course materials and also allows students to access the course.

- Demonstrate the optimization process on a sample set of materials and user data

Skills being sought

Anyone experienced with one of the following technologies is very welcome to join our team:

- Django and Django REST Framework

- A JavaScript MVC framework such as AngularJS, BackboneJS or EmberJS

- SASS as our CSS preprocessor and Bootstrap for responsive CSS

- D3.js and Charts.js for data visualization

Prerequisites

- Experience in one of the technologies mentioned above

References and background material
Contacts
Noa Feldman [noa.feldman@cern.ch]
Nils Fischer [nils.leif.fischer@cern.ch]
Ben Brüers [ben.bruers@cern.ch]
Michael Peters [m.peters@cern.ch]