Learner-Sourcing in an Engineering Class at Scale

Abstract

Teaching computer architecture as a hands-on engineering course to approximately 250 MIT students per semester requires a large, dedicated teaching staff. This Spring, a shortened version of the course will be deployed on edX to a potentially far larger cohort of students, without additional teaching staff. To better support students, we have deployed developmental versions of three learner-sourcing systems to as many as 500 students. These systems harvest and organize students' collective knowledge about debugging and optimizing solutions. We plan to deploy and study the next iteration of these systems on edX this Spring.