Education is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the United Nations. Considerable interest has been displayed in online education at scale, a new arising concept to realize this goal. Yet connecting online education to real jobs is still a challenge. This CHI workshop bridges this gap by bringing together groups and insights from related work at HCOMP, CSCW, and Learning at Scale. The workshop aims at providing opportunities for groups not yet in the focus of online education, exemplified by students who have not have equal access to higher education, compared to typical students in MOOCs.
The focus is on theoretical and empirical connections between online education and job opportunities which can reduce the financial gap, by providing students with an income during their studies. The workshop explores the technological analogue of the concept of ‘apprenticeship’, long established in the European Union, and education research [2]. This allows students to do useful work as an apprentice during their studies.
This workshop tackles such questions by bringing together participants from industry (e.g., platforms similar to Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk); education, psychology, and MOOCs (e.g., attendees of AERA, EDM, AIED, Learning at Scale); crowdsourcing and collaborative work (e.g., attendees of CHI, CSCW, NIPS, AAAI’s HCOMP).


Call for Participation
WorkLearn is a full-day workshop at CHI 2016 (May 8th) that will investigate the question how to link online education and labor at scale. We will investigate concepts like online apprenticeship and how to provide monetary independence for students in online education. We aim to establish a cross Atlantic community interested in the question how online learning can provide education for people with a low socioeconomic status.

The workshop focuses on:
Challenges and demands of industry
What skills do we need to train (crowd and online) workers for?
What can crowdsourcing do for learning at scale?
Platforms and software to connect online work and learning
How can a platform for online learning be linked to a platform for crowd work in a way that creates a more skilled workforce and better crowd work?

Embedding Learning in Work settings.
How to link online technology which supports work and problem-solving – such as decision and performance support systems – to just-in-time online training and educational resources. This includes implementing apprenticeship-like relationships between students and online workers to enhance learning, motivation, and independence.

Given these goals we are particularly open to the participation of PhD students and other early-career researchers. In this respect, we offer you the opportunity to join our workshop by writing a short two-page position paper addressing relevant subjects. The paper should tell us about you, your research, and your research goals. Please let us know why you are interested in the workshop and why you think your research can help education at scale fulfill its promise. The paper should contain a short summary of the state of the art research that you consider most influential to your goals. The second part should draw some lines between this state of art and your work. Submit your paper via e-mail to the workshop organizers: public.markus.krause@gmail.com. As CHI has changed some deadlines for this year’s workshops please visit www.worklearn.org for deadlines.

Submissions are chosen based on relevance, quality, and contribution.
Your WorkLearn organizers.