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1. Automatic Interpretable Personalized Learning

   Prihar, Ethan; Haim, Aaron; Sales, Adam; Heffernan, Neil (June 2022, Learning at Scale)

   Personalized learning stems from the idea that students benefit from instructional material tailored to their needs. Many online learning platforms purport to implement some form of personalized learning, often through on-demand tutoring or self-paced instruction, but to our knowledge none have a way to automatically explore for specific opportunities to personalize students’ education nor a transparent way to identify the effects of personalization on specific groups of students. In this work we present the Automatic Personalized Learning Service (APLS). The APLS uses multi-armed bandit algorithms to recommend the most effective support to each student that requests assistance when completing their online work, and is currently used by ASSISTments, an online learning platform. The first empirical study of the APLS found that Beta-Bernoulli Thompson Sampling, a popular and effective multi-armed bandit algorithm, was only slightly more capable of selecting helpful support than randomly selecting from the relevant support options. Therefore, we also present Decision Tree Thompson Sampling (DTTS), a novel contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm that integrates the transparency and interpretability of decision trees into Thomson sampling. In simulation, DTTS overcame the challenges of recommending support within an online learning platform and was able to increase students’ learning by as much as 10% more than the current algorithm used by the APLS. We demonstrate that DTTS is able to identify qualitative interactions that not only help determine the most effective support for students, but that also generalize well to new students, problems, and support content. The APLS using DTTS is now being deployed at scale within ASSISTments and is a promising tool for all educational learning platforms. 

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2. Automatic Interpretable Personalized Learning

   Prihar, Ethan; Haim, Aaron' Sales; Heffernan, Neil (June 2022, L@S '22: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale)

   Personalized learning stems from the idea that students benefit from instructional material tailored to their needs. Many online learning platforms purport to implement some form of personalized learning, often through on-demand tutoring or self-paced instruction, but to our knowledge none have a way to automatically explore for specific opportunities to personalize students’ education nor a transparent way to identify the effects of personalization on specific groups of students. In this work we present the Automatic Personalized Learning Service (APLS). The APLS uses multi-armed bandit algorithms to recommend the most effective support to each student that requests assistance when completing their online work, and is currently used by ASSISTments, an online learning platform. The first empirical study of the APLS found that Beta-Bernoulli Thompson Sampling, a popular and effective multi-armed bandit algorithm, was only slightly more capable of selecting helpful support than randomly selecting from the relevant support options. Therefore, we also present Decision Tree Thompson Sampling (DTTS), a novel contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm that integrates the transparency and interpretability of decision trees into Thomson sampling. In simulation, DTTS overcame the challenges of recommending support within an online learning platform and was able to increase students’ learning by as much as 10% more than the current algorithm used by the APLS. We demonstrate that DTTS is able to identify qualitative interactions that not only help determine the most effective support for students, but that also generalize well to new students, problems, and support content. The APLS using DTTS is now being deployed at scale within ASSISTments and is a promising tool for all educational learning platforms. 

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3. A Bandit You Can Trust

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3565472.3592955  

   Prihar, Ethan; Sales, Adam; Heffernan, Neil (July 2023, UMAP 2023)

   This work proposes Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy, a novel contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm that can adaptively assign personalized content to users while enabling unbiased statistical analysis. Traditional A/B testing and reinforcement learning approaches have trade-offs between empirical investigation and maximal impact on users. Our algorithm seeks to balance these objectives, allowing platforms to personalize content effectively while still gathering valuable data. Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy was evaluated via simulation and an empirical study in the ASSISTments online learning platform. In simulation, Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy performed comparably to existing algorithms and in ASSISTments, slightly increased students’ learning compared to A/B testing. Data collected from its recommendations allowed for the identification of qualitative interactions, which showed high and low knowledge students benefited from different content. Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy holds promise as a method to balance personalization with unbiased statistical analysis. All the data collected during the simulation and empirical study are publicly available at https://osf.io/zuwf7/. 

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4. A Bandit you can Trust.

   Prihar, E. (June 2023, Proceedings of The 31st ACM Conference On User Modeling, Adaptation And Personalization)

   This work proposes Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy, a novel con- textual multi-armed bandit algorithm that can adaptively assign personalized content to users while enabling unbiased statistical analysis. Traditional A/B testing and reinforcement learning ap- proaches have trade-offs between empirical investigation and max- imal impact on users. Our algorithm seeks to balance these objec- tives, allowing platforms to personalize content effectively while still gathering valuable data. Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy was evaluated via simulation and an empirical study in the ASSIST- ments online learning platform. In simulation, Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy performed comparably to existing algorithms and in ASSISTments, slightly increased students’ learning compared to A/B testing. Data collected from its recommendations allowed for the identification of qualitative interactions, which showed high and low knowledge students benefited from different content. Dynamic Linear Epsilon-Greedy holds promise as a method to bal- ance personalization with unbiased statistical analysis. All the data collected during the simulation and empirical study are publicly available at https://osf.io/zuwf7/. 

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5. Investigating the Impact of Skill-Related Videos on Online Learning.

   Prihar, E. (July 2023, Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Learning@Scale (L@S '23), July 20-22, 2023, Copenhagen, Denmark)

   Many online learning platforms and MOOCs incorporate some amount of video-based content into their platform, but there are few randomized controlled experiments that evaluate the effective- ness of the different methods of video integration. Given the large amount of publicly available educational videos, an investigation into this content’s impact on students could help lead to more ef- fective and accessible video integration within learning platforms. In this work, a new feature was added into an existing online learn- ing platform that allowed students to request skill-related videos while completing their online middle-school mathematics assign- ments. A total of 18,535 students participated in two large-scale randomized controlled experiments related to providing students with publicly available educational videos. The first experiment investigated the effect of providing students with the opportunity to request these videos, and the second experiment investigated the effect of using a multi-armed bandit algorithm to recommend relevant videos. Additionally, this work investigated which features of the videos were significantly predictive of students’ performance and which features could be used to personalize students’ learning. Ultimately, students were mostly disinterested in the skill-related videos, preferring instead to use the platforms existing problem- specific support, and there was no statistically significant findings in either experiment. Additionally, while no video features were significantly predictive of students’ performance, two video fea- tures had significant qualitative interactions with students’ prior knowledge, which showed that different content creators were more effective for different groups of students. These findings can be used to inform the design of future video-based features within online learning platforms and the creation of different educational videos specifically targeting higher or lower knowledge students. 

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