Apply for this job (no later than 21-04-2017)

 

Providing feedback to written assignments is still one of the bottlenecks in (higher) education. To date, there are very few solutions that do not increase the workload of teachers. The Open University of the Netherlands has the ambition to develop innovative solutions for this challenge. The PhD project will deal with advanced interactive text visualisations as a means to provide formative feedback to learners to help them to improve their essays. The PhD candidate will setup a text processing environment to explore and analyse the collected texts from learning management systems in controlled (quasi)-experimental settings. The PhD will apply methods from natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, interaction design and visualise results based on advanced visualization frameworks. Results of the PhD project will be shared via high-ranked journals and conferences.

 

Preferably the candidate holds a MSc degree in a relevant academic subject area such as computer science, data mining, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics or educational technology. The candidates are expected to have solid skills and proven experience software design and computer programming (e.g. JavaScript, Web Services, HTML5, XML, Python, R, and visualisation techniques). The candidates have ideally an analytical mindset, creativity, precision, proactivity and a passion for research and technology. Good academic writing skills in English and a passion to work in multidisciplinary and multinational contexts are advantageous. A basic level of Dutch and experiences in natural languages processing with the Dutch language are a plus as well as an understanding of experimental research and accompanying statistics.