Armando Fox, a trailblazer in technology-enhanced education, will receive the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from ACM. He will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Fox was selected by his peers for contributions to computing education through leadership and curriculum development in international online education; creating innovative courses, tools and inexpensive textbooks for software engineering; and outstanding teaching. Fox is a leader in the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) field. At the University of California, Berkeley, Fox designed and launched a MOOC on software engineering that has bestowed 20,000 earned certificates and attracted 300,000 auditors from around the world.

In Fox’s MOOC, students use free, modern, highly productive, open source programming frameworks to learn what had traditionally been taught only through lectures. To complement the MOOC, he and co-instructor Dave Patterson authored Engineering Software as a Service, a textbook which has garnered wide acclaim for being both accessible and affordable.

One traditional challenge for many MOOCs has been keeping students motivated to complete a course. Berkeley’s software engineering MOOC incorporates an autograder system, which gives students instant feedback on their work. Fox believes that continuous interaction is one of the best ways to encourage online students to remain engaged. “Autograder-enabled MOOCs have an opportunity to provide more structured pedagogy based on ‘learning by doing,’” he says.

In the field of technology-enhanced education, Fox is also credited with developing the concept of and coining the term “Small Private Online Course” (SPOC), an offshoot of the MOOC movement. Beyond providing course materials, SPOCs seek to recreate the dynamics of a group of students working together with an instructor in an online environment. Adds Fox, “I believe the conversations that MOOCs have catalyzed will certainly result in permanent and profound structural changes, not only to higher education but in particular to continuing education.”

Fox is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley and an ACM Distinguished Member. He has also been designated a “Top Researcher” by Scientific American.

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To Armando Fox, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the 2015 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for contributions to computing education through leadership and curriculum development in international online education; creating innovative courses, tools and inexpensive textbooks for software engineering; and outstanding teaching.