Brusilovsky and colleagues win best paper at EC-TEL 2014

09/20/2014

The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is proud to report that Professor Peter Brusilovsky and colleagues received the Best Paper award at EC-TEL 2014 on Thursday, September 18. Brusilovsky along with co-authors Tomasz Loboda, Julio Guerra and Roya Hosseini took home the prize for “Mastery Grids: An Open Source Social Educational Progress Visualization.”

The paper presents a social progress visualization aimed at mitigating the problem of low student usage of educational software. Preliminary results suggest that the approach detailed in the paper positively impacted students’ engagement. The paper was selected to receive the EATEL-sponsored award from more than 200 submissions.

The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) presents “a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field.” The theme of the 2014 conference was “Open Learning and Teaching in Educational Communities.”

Brusilovsky is Chair of the graduate program in Information Science and Technology (IST) at the iSchool. Loboda (PhD’14) defended his dissertation “Study and Detection of Mindless Reading” in the IST program, Guerra is a doctoral student in the IST program, and Hosseini is a doctoral student in the Intelligent Systems Program at Pitt.