Dr Lulu Shi at the Department of Education and Dr Fabian Stephany at the OII are looking for a research assistant (RA) who will work on a project “Augmented Learning or Automated Control? Revealing the Functions, Features, and Skills Affected by AI-based EdTech”.

This project investigates which tasks and skills are affected by the use of AI technologies in the education sector across OECD countries. To do this, the team will download, reviews and ratings data of education related apps from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The research assistant will scrape and analyse data from Google and Apple ap\rssp stores to gain an understanding of which aspects in the education sector is currently being digitalised and automated.

Skills:

  • Strong proficiency in Python and related libraries such as BeautifulSoup and Selenium
  • Experience in web scraping using Python and related libraries
  • Proficiency in working with R
  • Proficiency in working with databases (SQL, NoSQL) and Docker
  • Understanding of HTTP requests and responses, web page structure, and HTML/CSS
  • Knowledge of Git and version control systems
  • Experience with Natural Language Processing in either R or Python (e.g., Zero Shot Model for language analysis).
  • Experience in regression and time series analysis, hierarchical and k-means clustering
  • Knowledge on how to visualise data would be a plus.

To give you an example: have a look at this paper on fertility apps: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2va3n/

This project will use similar methodologies but for education related apps.

 

Start date: 18th September 2023

Duration: 12 weeks until 10th December 2023

Hours per week: Flexible, as workload may be unevenly distributed across the time span. The total working hour will not exceed 240h (it will likely to be less). We will accommodate to both, the RA’s as well as the project’s, schedule as best as possible.

Rate of pay: £19.59 per hour

Location: this is very flexible, fully remote work is possible

 

If you are interested, please send your CV and a short cover letter outlining your expertise specifically on each of the bullet points on skills noted above by 12 noon UK time on Tuesday 22 August to recruit@oii.ox.ac.uk. The email should be titled “RA EdTech apps “. If you have any questions related to the project or the scope of RA’s work, please contact lulu.shi@education.ox.ac.uk. Candidates will be contacted by the supervisor directly, shortly after the closing date.

Please note a valid right to work in the UK will be required for this role. A right to work check is a Home Office process to establish that each employee/casual worker has the right to work in the UK. Under the 2006 Immigration, Nationality and Asylum Act the University has a duty to prevent illegal working by carrying out document checks to confirm that a person has the right to work in the UK. All employees, casual workers and Tier 5 sponsored visa holders must have their right to work checked before they start work at the University.