Michael Alan Chang

Dr. Michael Alan Chang is the Margaret McGuire Earl Career Development Professor, a faculty fellow in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS), and an assistant director at the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation. Dr. Chang is a learning scientist and computer scientist who envisions AI-supported possibilities for teaching and learning that go outside the dominant, status quo instructional practices of schooling. He builds on ethical, relational, and speculative approaches to participatory design and closely partners with students, their families, and their teachers.

Dr. Chang’s current work has two major directions. First, he is exploring how sensibilities from the arts and humanities (e.g., attunements to relational and embodied ambiguity through improvisational movement, joint practices of attention at contemporary art) can support the collaborative and participatory design of expansive AI-Ed tools that support collaborative and equitable forms of learning, from envisioning to “looking under the hood” to building and modifying software. Second, he is exploring how a lens of educational dignity can inform the ethical design of the data infrastructures that underlie AI-Ed tools used in K-12 contexts.

Before coming to BU Wheelock, Dr. Chang led projects at the NSF Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT), where he led the development of the Learning Futures Workshops, a 3-years co-design effort that worked with youth, teachers, and families. His design work has directly led to the design and implementation of novel AI-based collaborative learning tools that support equitable and democratic outcomes of schooling. This tool, the Community Builder (CoBi), has been deployed in public middle and high schools across the country.

As a doctoral student, Dr. Chang designed and implemented privacy-preserving computing systems, studied system-level support for large scale training of deep neural networks, and developed approaches to automatically deploy and maintain “microservice” computing clusters. He publishes to a variety of different fields, spanning the learning sciences, AI for Education, human-computing interaction (HCI), artificial intelligence, and distributed systems and privacy preserving computing. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), Computers & Education: AI, Education Researcher, International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd), and Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

Dr. Chang is recruiting PhD students for the 2026-27 academic year to work with him and other faculty in the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation. Doctoral students join an intergenerational research community, with an advising family of Earl Center faculty (Professors Greg Benoit, Kate Frankel,  Eli Tucker-Raymond, and Beth Warren). See this flier for more information.

pronouns: he/him