Three Grand Challenges

Research in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) aims to address at least three Grand Challenges. Here we describe these Grand Challenges.

Connecting learners.

Learning is increasingly being seen as a continuous process developing through social interactions; people are at the heart of learning and knowledge construction, and communication between people characterises the social interactions through which learning takes place. Central to these communications are knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge building.

Information and communications technologies have a crucially important role in enabling communication and hence connecting learners with other learners and teachers, trainers, experts in a particular field or more knowledgeable others.  New tools allow new ways of knowledge sharing and building and include web-based applications such as open and closed forums, personal or shared blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging and video conferences, tagging and collaborative text editing systems such as Google Docs or Google Wave. Networking portals, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, allow learners to find, contact and keep in touch with like-minded people

Important and interesting issues arise from the new possibilities described above and here we highlight three and raise related questions:

• The collaborative building of knowledge enabled by tools such as wikis means that the creation and ownership of the knowledge is ‘democratised’ and contributors feel uneasy that their work can be undone or changed. What new practices, influenced or enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, will begin to emerge in educational institutions? How do teachers and students respond to working in public and making their work in progress visible and/or accessible for others (e.g. on a wiki)

·       The ease of ‘publishing’ work, thoughts and ideas means that it is difficult to understand what the provenance of much web-based publishing is.

• What is the provenance of information / knowledge? Where did it come from, and what is its quality? What and whom can we trust? Can the nature of a wiki be seen as an informal review system and how does it compare with the traditional peer review system within academia?

·       It can be argued that the success of communities (for learning) relies on an active and engaged community of networked learners, and it seems that this is influenced by both the tasks being carried out using the network and the organisation of the network.

• What can we learn from successful face to face and online networks to inform the development of new networks or communities of learning?

Orchestrating learning.

Learning can be seen to take place as individuals engage with opportunities for learning in formal institutions, in the workplace and generally throughout life. It can be argued that the role of educators, teachers or more knowledgeable others is to organise opportunities for learning in such a way that learners engage and build their knowledge. The ways in which opportunities for learning are organised is very complex and the metaphor of orchestration is used to conceptualise this. Orchestrating learning situations includes a consideration of the learners as individuals and as a group, the role of the teacher, the assessment associated with the situation and the tools used.

When the tools used include digital technologies (ICT), traditional models of orchestrating learning sometimes need re-thinking. For example, ICT provides mulitple sources (such as Internet pages) for learners to find things out that traditionally would have been provided by the teacher or the resources she offered (e.g. textbooks). ICT can sometimes provide the answers that were the goal of the learning situation, such as statistics calculations. ICT-based games can provide valuable learning situations and can be seen as a way of orchestrating learning that could exclude the teacher.

Understanding the orchestration of learning situations in which ICT plays a big part raises important issues. We raise three here.

• In which ways can TEL learning situations be seen to be more complex than learning situations in which digital technology is not used? Is the job of orchestration necessarily more complex in these situations?

• Historically, society has devolved to the teacher the role of the 'more knowledgeable' with respect to the students he/she is responsible for teaching. However it is increasingly recognised that other students within a teacher/student community might also be 'more knowledgeable others'. In TEL situations within educational institutions how can teachers harness the collective ‘wisdom of students’, whilst at the same time valuing their own role as ‘knowledgeable other’?

• Assessment of and for learning is generally seen to be a crucially important constraint in the orchestration of learning. Assesment allows the teacher or trainer to make sense of what is happening in order to evolve in a way which effectively supports learning, and beyond that provides the means to certify the knowledge, skills or competences of individuals. How can we best articulate TEL approaches in the classroom with effective assessment processes?

Contextualising virtual learning environments and instrumentalising learning contexts.

It is well recognised that learning is influenced by the context in which it takes place, where the context includes physical objects, digital objects such as online resources and people in the environment of the learner. The context provides clues for learning, either explicitly or implicitly. However, not only does learning occur in a context, it also creates context through continual interaction and hence context shifts and changes continuously.

Traditionally, formal learning has taken place within the context of classrooms and workplaces, where the tools used, the roles of individuals and the content of the learning were relatively well understood and stable. With the introduction of digital technologies, and mobile technologies in particular, learners can be exposed to a wider range of contexts than was previously possible. 

It is also well recognised that learners respond well to learning opportunities that meet their individual needs, by taking into account their prior learning and their preferred learning approaches and addressing their individual interests. Digital technolgies can support contexualised personalised environments and opportunties for learning.

Three questions arising are discussed below:

• It can be argued that the increasingly wide range of contexts becoming available to learners through the use of digital technologies are often novel and outside the experience of teachers. How do these novel experiences affect teaching and learning? How can we develop understanding of the ways in which novel experiences can both contribute to and inhibit  particular learning?
• If we develop novel contexts based on an understanding of the relationship between novel experiences and learning, how should technology develop in order to support these experiences.
• Digital technologies can provide learners with opportunties to engage with learning in many physical locations and at any time of the day, often using a combination of different hardware devices and many different software tools. How can we achieve ways of engaging with the opportunities available in terms of the interoperability of systems?

Last updated 736 days ago by Marie Joubert