Enriching STEM education through personalization and teaching collaboration

Advances in databases, computational intelligence, and pervasive computing, which allow “anytime, anywhere” transparent access to information, provide fertile ground for radical changes in pedagogy. Cyberinfrastructure leveraging these technological advances can yield improvements in both instruction and learning, supporting a networked curricular model, facilitating collaboration within and among groups of students and instructors, and providing continuous access to instructional material. The trajectory followed by each student through the curriculum can be intelligently personalized, based on prior knowledge and skills, learning styles, and interests of the student, among other attributes. We propose to achieve these objectives by developing Pervasive Cyberinfrastructure for Personalized Learning and Instructional Support (PERCEPOLIS), which serves as the centerpiece of an experiment to create a community of faculty and students over a set of campuses, focusing on STEM disciplines. While numerous distance learning methods exist, we believe that the best way to provide STEM education is to use a blended approach - one that embraces both online components and classroom mentoring by qualified faculty members. The goal is to provide high-quality STEM education for the students, while raising the skill set of the entire community through teaching collaboration.