Dr. Ryan Baker
Professor
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Dr. Ryan Baker’s Talk
JeepyTA and Qualitative Coding: Recent Work with Large Language Models in Education at the Penn Center for Learning Analytics
Contemporary large language models (LLMs), though the culmination of years-long effort, have exploded into much greater use in education in the last year.
LLMs provide a wide range of opportunities, as seen in tools like Khanmigo, and present unique challenges compared to previous-generation technologies, such as hallucinations, irreproducibility, and perspective-switching.
In this talk, I will discuss ongoing efforts at the Penn Center for Learning Analytics to leverage large language models for educational research and development. On the development side, we have used LLMs to create an AI teaching assistant
and to provide feedback for introductory computer programming. On the research side, we have used LLMs to enhance the process of qualitative data coding. In this talk, I will discuss the successes and (sometimes hilarious) failures of these approaches.
About Dr. Ryan Baker
Dr. Ryan Baker is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics. Dr. Baker has developed models that can automatically detect student engagement in over a dozen online learning environments, and led the development of an observational protocol and app for field observation of student engagement that has been used by over 150 researchers in 7 countries. Predictive analytics models he helped develop have been used to benefit over two million students, over a hundred thousand people have taken MOOCs he ran, and he has coordinated longitudinal studies that spanned over a decade. Dr. Baker was the founding president of the International Educational Data Mining Society, is currently serving as Editor of the journal Computer-Based Learning in Context, is Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Data Mining, was the first technical director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, and currently serves as Co-Director of the MOOC Replication Framework (MORF). Dr. Baker has co-authored published papers with over 400 colleagues and has been cited over 25,000 times.