My experience at eMOOCs (Anas Ahachad)

The story begins with me being a person who is really obsessed with technology and education areas. This is clear in the field in which I am involved and for which I am going to obtain a PhD degree soon; Machine Learning. Knowing that MOOCs involve a lot of technicalities that are so close to my area of specialty encouraged me to seek volunteering in this event. It was such great time to be part of this wonderful team and this important event; A real summit that involved leaders of e-Learning from all over the globe in which I got to meet and talk to the leaders and founders of the most important MOOCs such as Anant Agarwal of edX and Rick Levin of Coursera, Simon Nelson of Futurelearn and researchers of the most important Arabic platform “edraak”. A few years back, particularly in 2013, I registered in one of Coursera's first courses, Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning. Hence, it was of such great joy to see researchers like him presenting their last methods and strategies.

During the first day of event, I was in charge of reception of guests and guiding them to the registration table for which I had to start my volunteer work one hour before the opening of the summit. I had the honor to accompany very important professionals and researchers such as Anant Agarwal and brought them to the building where the event was held!

After the start of the event, I got to meet other researchers and professors from my area of study who were participants in different sessions and workshops whether as auditors or as presenters. I was so lucky, as I had the opportunity to learn more about the topic of MOOCs and what people do in this umbrella. It was clear that this event had the best of the best talents from prestigious universities like MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc. For example, when one of the presenters was describing a system that he developed, he mentioned that in order to solve a specific problem, he used a specific algorithm. One of the participants raised his hand and said that he was the developer of that algorithm! Another example was seeing someone program while he followed the presentation that was held. Also, I got to make new contacts for developing my skills in these areas and for building research collaborations through talking to some of the experts during the summit. As part of the volunteering work, I got the chance to register for a workshop of my choice. During the atelier that I attended “Learning Analytics to Overcome Language Barriers”, it was very interesting; on the one hand, I met a wonderful team of researchers from the University of Southampton in UK that we planned work side by side in a future project, and on the other hand, I tried to apply my background in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for resolving a practice case: “the assessment of students” which we can use the algorithms of Question Answering, Word Sense Disambiguation and also Speech Recognition to automate the task of evaluation.

Furthermore, I made friends with a researcher from MIT who told me about his line of work and his research interests. I talked to him about my work as well and even invited him to my lab to show him some of my work. I was excited by the new ideas that we developed together. Moreover, the cream of all this event was meeting new friends from my university; we got to talk about the differences and similarities between our fields of study, It was fun to know of all these colleagues. I had great time working with you guys!