Email
nth@wpi.edu
Office
Unity Hall 388
Phone
+1 (508) 8315000 x5569
Affiliated Department or Office
Learning Sciences & Technology
Education
BA Amherst College 1993
MS Carnegie Mellon University 1998
PhD Carnegie Mellon University 2001

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.



Professor Heffernan also Directs the Learning Science and Technologies Graduate Program. He is always interested in working with new students in solving these problems, and says ASSISTments has been created by WPI students for the world. Professor Heffernan's goal is to give ASSISTments to millions across the US and internationally as a free service of WPI.

News

SEE MORE NEWS ABOUT Neil Heffernan
Government Technology
Who should be regulating AI classroom tools?

Computer science professor Neil Heffernan spoke with Government Technology about the public discussion over regulations of artificial intelligence. He explained why regulations could stifle research and development and lead to monopolization.

EdSurge
I Took a Break From the Classroom to Help Do Research. It Made Me a Stronger Teacher.

EdSurge published an article by seventh-grade teacher Andrew Burnett, FA Day Middle School in Newton, in which she sited her work with Neil Heffernan, the William Smith Dean's Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies Program at WPI. She detailed how her research for Heffernan, involving ASSISTments, a responsive online learning tool based in learning science that was founded by Heffernan and his wife, impacted her teaching when she returned to the classroom.