Abstract:

After decades of research on AI in education, we have solved some problems and are facing new challenges. Precision education is one of the new challenges of applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and learning analytics for adaptive and individualized learning in a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment. The goal of Precision education is to identify at-risk students as early as possible and provide timely intervention based on student learning experiences. In this research, at-risk students are confined to students who were diagnosed could get low GPA (low academic performance), could drop/withdraw a course, or students who were low engagement in terms of learning behavior, emotion, and cognition. The idea of Precision education came from The Precision Medicine Initiative (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/precision-medicine), which was proposed by President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address, the Initiative is a new research effort to revolutionize the medical treatment of disease. As addressed in this Initiative, most treatments were designed for the average patients as a result of one-size-fits-all-approach without taking into account individual differences in people genes, environments, and lifestyles; similarly, most pedagogy is designed not fully consider students genes IQ, learning styles, learning environments, and learning strategies. Therefore, by carrying the research focus of Precision medicine, which is to improve the diagnosis, prediction, treatment, and prevention of disease, we define the new challenges of Precision education on emphasizing the improvement of diagnosis, prediction, treatment, and prevention of at-risk students.

Biography:

Dr. Stephen J.-H. Yang is the Chair Professor of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan. Dr. Yang received the Outstanding Research Award from Ministry of Science; Technology (2010, 2017) and Distinguished Service Medal from Ministry of Education, Taiwan. (2015). Dr. Yang was the Director of Department of Information and Technology Education, Ministry of Education, Taiwan (2013~2014), during his two years of service in Taiwan government, Dr. Yang was responsible for the national information & technology education, he launched Taiwan national digital learning initiative which includes the construction of 100G Taiwan Academic Network for national network infrastructure, the construction of Education Cloud for national data infrastructure, and innovation programs such as Taiwan MOOCs, flipped classroom, mobile learning. Dr. Yang also served as the Convener of Information Education Discipline, Ministry of Science & Technology. Dr. Yang received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1995. Dr. Yang has published over 70 SSCI/SCI journal papers. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, learning analytics, educational data mining, and MOOCs. As shown on Google Scholar Citation, Dr. Yang publication citation indices has been over 11,000, especially on the main research themes, Artificial Intelligence in education is ranked #6, Learning analytics is ranked #8, Educational data mining is ranked #3, MOOCs is ranked #4. Dr. Yang is currently the Co-Editors-in-Chief of the International Journal of Knowledge Management & e-Learning.