Master’s in Learning Sciences & Technologies
The educational technology industry needs the expertise a degree in learning sciences and technologies delivers, and the STEM-focused program at WPI offers expertise in varied areas such as intelligent tutoring, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.
Graduate students in WPI’s well-funded learning sciences and technologies program work with real students and teachers in their classrooms to discover the nuances of real-world needs so they can tailor their research to help solve them.
Varied backgrounds are essential to this field—computer scientists, educators, and social scientists who are passionate about ensuring that educational practices keep pace with technological advances have an opportunity to immediately impact thousands of students with their research.
With a location in the regional hub of educational technology, WPI is in close proximity to more than 150 start-ups that aim to understand and improve the educational process with their technologies.
Faculty Profiles
Neil T. Heffernan enjoys doing educational data mining and running the ASSISTments system. ASSISTments helps schools teach better. It’s a web service hosted at WPI that allows teachers to assign nightly homework or daily class work. Students get instant feedback while teachers get live reports. Professor Heffernan enjoys supervising WPI students in creating ASSISTments content and features. He has 6 dozens paper in educational data mining, and 20+ papers in comparing different ways to optimize student learning.
Erin Ottmar is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Learning Sciences at WPI. She received her BA in psychology and elementary education from the University of Richmond. After college, she spent several years teaching in Ecuador and Japan. In 2011, she received her PhD in Educational Psychology: Applied Developmental Science from the University of Virginia. After graduate school, spent 3 years as a post-doctoral research scientist at the University of Richmond.
My research interests are in applied machine learning, computer vision, data science and their applications to education, affective computing, and human behavior recognition. My work is highly interdisciplinary and frequently intersects cognitive science, psychology, and education. Before joining WPI, I was a research scientist at the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning at Harvard University. In 2012, I co-founded Emotient, a San Diego-based startup company for automatic emotion and facial expression recognition.
Joseph Beck, assistant professor of Computer Science, has been at WPI since 2007. His research focuses on educational data mining, a new discipline that develops techniques for analyzing large educational data sets to make discoveries that will improve teaching and learning. His work centers on estimating how computer tutors impact learning. He established the first workshop in the field and in 2008 was program co-chair of the first International Conference on Educational Data Mining.