Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham will speak at the Coursera Partners Conference, which will be held March 6-8 at Arizona State University. The theme of this year's conference is "Learners First: Beyond the Campus Walls." Participants will discuss best practices for creating top-quality, in-demand, and affordable online learning experiences.
Cunningham will present her poster, "Managing Coursera Data: A Data Workflow Case Study," on March 6 and speak on the same topic at the session, "Tips and Tricks to Design Your Own Research," on March 7. She is a member of the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) Data Analytics Group at the University of Illinois, which is responsible for receiving, processing, documenting, and sharing the University's Coursera data so that researchers at Illinois have a better understanding of how to use it.
According to Cunningham, the Coursera Data Table Documentation wiki she created for both the current and previous Coursera data export structures was promoted by Coursera for use by other partner institutions.
"Given our extensive experience with Coursera data preparation, analysis, and distribution, our unit serves as a model for best practices for helping non-researchers apply research insights to online learning experiences, developing strategies for using data to improve learner outcomes, designing and conducting online research that impacts outcomes, and gaining new insights from Coursera data exports," she said.
Cunningham is a fifth-year doctoral candidate at the iSchool whose research interests focus on how information technologies connect people who are spread out in space and time. She explores issues such as how social media and online learning systems connect geographically dispersed peoples, both for community building and educational purposes.