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As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in early months of 2020, education at all levels was pushed to emergency fully remote, online formats. This emergency shift affected all aspects of teaching and learning with very little notice and often…
Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) simplify LLM alignment by directly optimizing policies, bypassing reward modeling and RL. While DAAs differ in their use of SFT (one-stage vs. two-stage) and the scalar score they optimize (likelihood vs.…
Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile software development approach that has been widely claimed to improve software quality. However, the extent to which TDD improves quality appears to be largely dependent upon the…
AI-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have significant potential to transform teaching and learning. As efforts continue to design, develop, and integrate ITS into educational contexts, mixed results about their effectiveness have…
The transition of teaching activities to online mode, forced by the Covid-19 emergency, had also positive aspects, as it pushed to create new contents and use new approaches. An example is represented by our experience at the Department of…
As a result of the spread of COVID-19 during spring 2020, many colleges and universities across the US, and beyond, were compelled to move entirely to remote, online instruction, or shut down. Due to the rapidity of this transition,…
Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their…
Student assessment is one of the most fundamental tasks in the field of AI Education (AIEd). One of the most common approach to student assessment is Knowledge Tracing (KT), which evaluates a student's knowledge state by predicting whether…
Astronomy, often perceived as a distant or luxury science, holds immense potential as a driver for sustainable local socio-economic development. This paper explores how astronomy can create tangible benefits for communities through…
Astronomy is changing. Large projects, large collaborations, and large budgets are becoming the norm. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one example of this new astronomy, and in operating the original survey, we put in place and…
Technology enables a more sustainable and universally accessible educational model. However, technology has brought a paradox into students' lives: it helps them engage in learning activities, but it is also a source of distraction. During…
Remote ATC simulation training is an emerging technology in aviation education during COVID. Professional training institutions can learn from others, whereas the experiences of developing remote ATC simulation teaching/training with the…
To enhance student learning, we demonstrate an experimental study to analyze student learning outcomes in online and in-class sections of a core data communications course of the Undergraduate IT program in the Information Sciences and…
This paper proposes a novel approach to address the challenge that pretrained VLA models often fail to effectively improve performance and reduce adaptation costs during standard supervised finetuning (SFT). Some advanced finetuning methods…
Autonomous discovery and direct instruction are two distinct sources of learning in children but education sciences demonstrate that mixed approaches such as assisted discovery or guided play result in improved skill acquisition. In the…
The purpose of this white paper is to provide guidance to funding agencies, leaders in the discipline, and its constituent departments about strategies for (1) improving access to advanced education for people from populations that have…
Policy Brief on "Global Data in Astronomy: Challenges and Opportunities", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July…
We observe that current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods suffer from the performance imbalance issue when performing multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) tasks. While these methods may achieve impressive performance on average, they…
Many early career educators, such as teaching assistants (TAs) in college courses, as well as pre-college educators, need help both with content and pedagogical knowledge to effectively help their students learn. One pedagogical approach…