SBIR Phase II: Using Intervention and Feedback to Improve Group Function In Online Contexts

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响是在在线参与中创建一个在线的即时反馈机制，以提高人们群体设置的软技能。近年来，在线学习体验的爆炸式增长，许多课程无法吸引学习者，也无法帮助他们实现学术和职业目标，这主要集中在参与度问题上。人们对在线学习的兴趣仍然很高，因为它提供了一个扩大机构和公司影响力的机会，但在广泛可用的学习体验方面，成功率很低。他的项目将人工智能领域的新兴创新应用于大规模提供高质量学习的问题。虽然大多数应用程序侧重于个体学习者和创建新的个性化教育途径，但该项目强调了集体学习的重要性和同伴参与的力量，以帮助学习社区的所有成员共同实现他们的目标。这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目将进一步开发专门的视频和文字聊天工具，从参与同步在线学习的群体中收集数据，分析和分类交流模式，并向学生提供反馈，帮助他们获得更好、更成功的在线体验。该项目介绍了数据捕获和分析方面的几项创新，并在学习者在线协作时向他们提供反馈。虽然许多学生使用在线协作工具，如讨论板、聊天和视频，但本项目侧重于提供干预措施，以实时改变行为。在谈话中，比如当人们集思广益解决问题或共同完成任务时，某些声音模式表明了参与，揭示了未声明的协议和分歧，并暴露了个人偏见。使用深度学习和数据建模，生成关于会话支配地位的实时反馈，并在学习者说话时显示给他们。该项目进一步探索了机器生成的关于协作过程中发生的事情的见解的影响，并基于预测模型提出了关于行为修改的建议。为了获得更细致的见解，这些数据与面部手势数据（如点头或扬起眉毛）配对。总之，这些创新将以前从未大规模收集的数据与独特应用于在线学习的社会科学数据模型相结合。该项目的目标是证明像这样的见解对学习结果有积极的影响，并提高对包含这些工具的在线学习体验的满意度。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to create an online, instantaneous feedback mechanism during online engagements to improve soft skills of people group settings. The explosion of online learning experiences in recent years, in which many courses fail to engage learners or help them achieve their academic and professional goals, has focused on the problem of engagement. Interest in online learning remains high, as it presents an opportunity to broaden the reach of institutions and companies, but success rates in broadly available learning experiences are low. he project applies emerging innovations in artificial intelligence to the problem of delivering high-quality learning at scale. While most applications focus on individual learners and creating new personalized educational pathways, this project highlights the importance of collective learning and the power of peer engagement to help all members of a learning community reach their goals together. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop specialized video and text chat tools to collect data from groups engaged in synchronous online learning, analyze and categorize patterns of communication, and give feedback to students to help them have better, more successful experiences online. This project introduces several innovations in data capture and analytics, as well as feedback to learners while they are collaborating online. While many students use online collaboration tools such as discussion boards, chat, and video, this project focuses on providing interventions to change behavior in real-time. During conversations, such as those happening when people brainstorm to solve a problem or work on shared assignments, certain vocal patterns indicate engagement, reveal unstated agreements and discords, and expose individual biases. Using deep learning and data modeling, real-time feedback about conversational dominance is generated and shown to learners while they are speaking. The project further explores the effect of machine-generated insights about what happened during the collaboration, and makes recommendations about behavior modifications, based on predictive models. For more nuanced insights, these data are paired with facial-gestural data, such as nodding or raising one’s eyebrows. Together, these innovations combine data that has never been collected at scale before with social science data models uniquely applied to online learning. The goal of the project is to prove that insights like these have a net positive effect on learning outcomes and raise the level of satisfaction with online learning experiences that incorporate these tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.