Prof. Jim Slotta, University of Toronto, Canada

 

Jim Slotta (co- PI) is Professor and President's Chair in Knowledge Technologies and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. From 1997 – 2005, Slotta led the design of the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) at University of California, Berkeley (Slotta & Linn, 2009). WISE sought to transform patterns of interaction in K-12 science classrooms by providing scaffolded inquiry projects. Teachers were empowered to engage with students in more dialogic modes. Since 2005, Dr. Slotta has led a team of students, designers and developers to investigate new models of collaborative and collective inquiry. These studies have advanced a pedagogical model known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), in which students and teachers work together as a learning community to engage in collective inquiry. From 2006 - 2011, Slotta served as Canada Research Chair in Education and Technology, serving as PI or co-I on more than 30 funded projects and supervising 20 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. This work has resulted in numerous technology-enhanced learning environments, such Common Knowledge (CK), a collective note-taking and orchestration environment (Fong & Slotta, 2018), and SAIL Smart Space, a "smart classroom" infrastructure that employed intelligent agents to coordinate student groupings, activities, resource distribution and place-based interactions (Slotta, Tissenbaum & Lui, 2013; Tissenbaum & Slotta, 2019a & 2019b). In 2019, Slotta launched the Critical Action Learning Exchange (CALE), where teachers develop, exchange and discuss competency-centered curriculum that empowers students as learners, providing meaning and purpose to their schooling experience and scaffolding their formation of learner and career identity (Slotta et al, 2025A). In the past 4 years, Slotta and his team have developed the SCripting and ORchestration Environment (SCORE), an open source "agentic AI" framework for supporting collective inquiry in classrooms and hybrid spaces (Slotta et al, 2025B). SCORE allows the design of complex collaboration and inquiry scripts (including supportive authoring environments), with intelligent agents that actively monitor and process student contributions in real time, allowing dynamic allocation of resources, student grouping, and place-based interactions. SCORE aims to support research of pedagogy and practice in formal and informal learning environments, delivering on the promise of rich media, place-based learning and real-time learning analytics.

 

Prof. Ryan Baker, University of Pennsylvania, US

 

Ryan Baker is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Education at Adelaide University and Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania. Baker has developed models that can automatically detect student engagement in over a dozen online learning environments, and led the development of an observational protocol and app for field observation of student engagement that has been used by over 150 researchers in 7 countries. Predictive analytics models he helped develop have been used to benefit over two million students, over a hundred thousand people have taken MOOCs he ran, and he has coordinated longitudinal studies that spanned over a decade. Baker was the founding president of the International Educational Data Mining Society, is Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Data Mining, was the first technical director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, currently serves as Co-Director of the JeepyTA learning platform, and founded two Masters degree programs in Learning Analytics. Baker has co-authored published papers with over 600 colleagues and has been cited over 40,000 times.