Members of LucyLabs, as well as other collaborating faculty members and students, have had four full papers accepted to the 2020 Learning @ Scale conference. The papers are:

• The Synchronicity Paradox in Online Education, by David A. Joyner, Qiaosi Wang, Suyash Thakare, Shan Jing, Ashok Goel and Blair MacIntyre. This paper looks at how three independent studies all point to the existence of a “synchronicity paradox”, whereby students can only enroll in asynchronous learning experiences due to individual needs and constraints, but once enrolled they crave synchronous experiences.
• Informal Learning Communities: The Other Massive Open Online ‘C’, written by Will Hudgins, Michael Lynch, Ash Schmal, Harsh Sikka, Michael Swenson and David A. Joyner. This paper applies a learning at scale lens to an often-understudied portion of online learning, informal learning communities, such as StackOverflow and certain subreddits.
• Affordable Degrees at Scale: New Phenomenon or New Hype?, by David S. Park, Robert W. Schmidt, Charankumar Akiri, Stephanie Kwak and David A. Joyner. This paper looks at the landscape of online degrees to assess the extent to which the new era of MOOC-based degrees is entirely original, or if there are more similarities than expected to preexisting online degree programs.
• Sensing Affect to Empower Students: Learner Perspectives on Affect-Sensitive Technology in Large Educational Contexts by Qiaosi Wang, Shan Jing, David A. Joyner, Lauren Wilcox, Hong Li, Thomas Plötz and Betsy DiSalvo. This study looks at student perspectives on the rising tide of using wearable devices and other affect-sensitive technologies to tailor educational experiences to individual learners.

Learning @ Scale 2020 will take place virtually in August.