Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (... more Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (mass participation citizen science and learning to be a scientist through scientific inquiry, , and a concern to involve participation by the members of a community for community purposes. We describe the work we have done on this topic developing from our initial experiments in supporting inquiry learning with school children using technology and describing how this work has developed through conducting a number of studies involving students in a university technical college, and distance education students, then widened into investigation of the ideas with members of the public conducting citizen inquiries. These experiences have been supported by the development of the web platform nQuire () which is now the basis of our work. Our approach to citizen inquiry is driven by a concern for the nature of the participation from which members of the public can benefit and goes beyond involving people solely as volunteer data collectors. We report here on our experiences of the different types of inquiries or missions which have run on the platform since 2018, and the views of some participants on their involvement. We also discuss the issues in developing our vision of community citizen science inquiry and a potential centre for democratising research.
Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
We outline the features of an initiative to improve the inclusivity and transparency of research ... more We outline the features of an initiative to improve the inclusivity and transparency of research by using methods utilized by the citizen science community to develop participation in research projects by members of the public. Our aim is to transform the prevalent approach to public participation in such projects from the limited roles of data provider or data analyst and extending roles to that of co-researcher or stakeholder. We describe our approach to citizen science inquiry and discuss how it forms the basis of our intention and plan to advance the democratization of research. A pilot project of the approach is described. Challenges in the approach are outlined.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This ninth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a widespread influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK, collaborated with researchers from the Artificial Intelligence and Human Languages Lab/Institute of Online Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University. A long list of new educational concepts, terms, theories and practices was proposed and then pared down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice. Finally, ten sketches of innovative pedagogies were compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources, and they are summarised below. It can also enable comparisons between word usage or concepts in different languages to help develop cultural awareness. Researchers maintain that there is a need for more corpora that are accessible, diverse and adaptable for language instruction. 5. A therapist chatbot ('Sometimes you need to talk things through, but everyone seems to have an opinion or analysis of your situation. All you need is someone who will listen and ask the right questions to help you figure things out. That's Wysa'
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactiv... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This eighth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (UK) collaborated with researchers from the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. We proposed a long list of new educational concepts, terms, theories, and practices and pared them down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation. Debates around AI increasingly focus on what is unique to humans that we need to preserve and perhaps amplify. It is often argued that critical thinking and creativity are uniquely human. Aspects of communication and collaboration are also (still) uniquely human, such as the ability to appreciate a humorous remark, or to work towards a solution to a problem by conducting several conversations across multiple media.
Citizen science is a growing trend in involving the public in different types of collaboration wi... more Citizen science is a growing trend in involving the public in different types of collaboration with scientists. The growth of this activity has consequences for data collection, data analysis and the way in which science is carried out. It also has a potential impact on what, and how, citizen scientists learn about science when engaged in such activities. The purpose of this research is to explore the practices adopted by participants in citizen science projects, and in particular the influence on learning for the participants in these projects which rely on technology to support collaboration. The growth of citizen science projects is occurring at the same time as a growth of interest in informal learning and both are supported by technology enhanced learning. To make best use of the rapidly growing area of citizen science in the development of learning, it needs to be studied as a newly developing interdisciplinary area, with the consequence of unravelling the mechanisms by which ...
nQuire (nquire.org.uk) is an innovative citizen science (CS) platform for learning, developed at ... more nQuire (nquire.org.uk) is an innovative citizen science (CS) platform for learning, developed at the Open University UK in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It operationalizes the concept of ‘citizen inquiry’, that is the fusion of citizen science and inquiry-based learning. It enables members of the public to join or set up their own investigations or ‘missions’ to explore themselves and their environment. Each mission involves finding out about how CS works at scale and gaining insight into current issues such as personal wellbeing. An example of an nQuire mission is Gardenwatch; this is a survey of UK private gardens, produced by BBC Springwatch and the British Trust for Ornithology. Over 200,000 people completed surveys of their gardens on nQuire, as well as sharing their findings on social media. We are now researching how to capture and improve the impact of nQuire on citizens’ learning and engagement. Our vision is to educate the general public in...
This quality enhancement report recommends priority areas for university activity in relation to ... more This quality enhancement report recommends priority areas for university activity in relation to massive open online courses (MOOCs). It also identifies research questions that need to be addressed in future. It does this by bringing together all the published research work in this area that has been produced by UK academic partners associated with the FutureLearn MOOC platform from the launch of the first MOOC in 2008 until September 2016.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learning
The 2018 and 2019 AIED conferences workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Was an important but only ... more The 2018 and 2019 AIED conferences workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Was an important but only a first step towards addressing the far-reaching ethical questions raised by the field of AIED. The reality is that, although there are encouraging signs, most AIED research, development and deployment continues to take place in what is essentially a moral vacuum. In short, still today, little research has been undertaken, no guidelines have been provided, no policies have been developed, and no regulations have been enacted to address the specific ethical issues raised by the application of AI in educational contexts. For these reasons, for the EC-TEL 2019 conference, we proposed a third ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Workshop. This built on the outcomes of the previous workshops (which includes a journal paper and commissioned book). It was an opportunity for researchers who are exploring AIED ethical issues to share their insights, to identify key ethical issues, to map out how to address...
This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnersh... more This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnership between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance. Informed by action research, this four-year project was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed school-university engagement with research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. Through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students. We therefore introduced a flexible and adaptable framework of four types of activity—open lectures, open dialogues, open inquiry and open creativity—combined with an upstream approach to planning based on a set of six principles. A sub-set of these activities were evaluated through a c...
The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for de... more The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for decades. Following the disruption arising from Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a move to remote teaching in universities across the world. This move has put the transformation or digital revolution in the limelight in the media. TEL is of strategic importance to the conduct of teaching, learning and research in education internationally. TEL, when combined with the growing benefits of open approaches to education, leads to a potentially transformational means of learning. In this paper the authors introduce some examples of research projects from the Open University’s OpenTEL research grouping. These examples highlight some of the work conducted relating to supporting students, universities, and communities using TEL during the pandemic. OpenTEL research has identified that Covid-19 has exposed the need for better institutional support for students who are facing stress and disruption in...
International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 2020
The purpose of most citizen science projects is engaging citizens in providing data to scientists... more The purpose of most citizen science projects is engaging citizens in providing data to scientists, not supporting citizen learning about science. Any citizen learning that does occur in most projects is normally a by-product of the project rather than a stated aim.This study examines learning outcomes of citizens participating in online citizen science communities purposely designed for inquiry learning. The 'Citizen inquiry' approach adopted in this study prioritises and scaffolds learning and engages people in all stages of the scientific process by involving them in inquiry-based learning while participating in citizen science activities. The exploratory research involved an intervention with two design studies of adult volunteer participants engaging in citizen-led inquiries, employing a mixed-methods approach. The findings indicated that, in both design studies, participants engaged in an inquiry process, and practised inquiry skills alongside other kinds of knowledge and skills not directly related to science. Differences between the outcomes of each study highlighted the importance of the design on learning impact. In particular, participant understanding of research processes and methods, and developing more experimental studies were more evident with the support of a dynamic representation of the inquiry process. Furthermore, in the second study, which was hosted in a more engaging and interactive learning environment, participants perceived science as fun, were involved in inquiry discussions, and showed progress in scientific vocabulary. The paper concludes with some considerations for science educators and citizen science facilitators to enhance the learning outcomes of citizen inquiry and similar online communities for science inquiries.
Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages o... more Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages of the scientific research, mostly data collection and processing. They are less likely to have an explicit objective to support and promote volunteers' learning. In response to that, “citizen inquiry” emphases citizens' learning and community education, by viewing CS as an opportunity to educate the general public in thinking and acting scientifically. In citizen inquiry, citizens can take part in all the stages of the scientific research, from setting up an inquiry of personal interest, to deciding on the methods of data collection, analysis, and reporting. To ensure data quality when non-professionals design their own or take part in existing investigations, we have designed a bespoke online technological solution, the nQuire platform (nquire.org.uk), with support from the Open University/BBC partnership. nQuire scaffolds the design of high quality scientific inquiries through ...
Educational visions: The lessons from 40 years of innovation, 2019
The first joint project undertaken by the Computers and Learning research group was the evaluatio... more The first joint project undertaken by the Computers and Learning research group was the evaluation of The Open University Science Faculty's CAL offering in 1979. Since then many CALRG activities such as PhD projects, major external research grants, and institutional contributions, have been directed towards a better understanding of what makes science teaching and learning better. In this chapter we will consider our work on conceptual change in science and on the development of pedagogy and technology on personal inquiry using nQuire, and include work integrating these developments into the Open Science Laboratory. Our work has included evaluation of other innovative pedagogical supports such as the Puck-Land simulation for teaching Physics, Virtual Field Trips and the use of the Virtual Microscope both in the UK and a number of other UK and EU universities. We illustrate how judicious use of technology and pedagogy can promote enthusiastic engagement with science and give opportunities for participation and learning.
Supporting immigrant language learning on smartphones: A field trial. Studies in the Education of... more Supporting immigrant language learning on smartphones: A field trial. Studies in the Education of Adults, 49(2) pp. 228-252. For guidance on citations see FAQs.
There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and com... more There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability. What is negotiable is how best to achieve the development of those skills, in particular which teaching and learning approaches are suitable for facilitating or enabling complex skills development. In this paper, we build on our previous work of exploring new forms of pedagogy for an interactive world, as documented in our Innovating Pedagogy report series. We present a set of innovative pedagogical approaches that have the potential to guide teaching and transform learning. An integrated framework has been developed to select pedagogies for inclusion in this paper, consisting of the following five dimensions: (a) relevance to effective educational theories, (b) research evidence about the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogies, (c) relation to the development of twenty-first century skills, (d) innovative aspects of pedagogy, and (e) level of adoption in educational practice. The selected pedagogies, namely formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with drones, learning with robots, and citizen inquiry are either attached to specific technological developments, or they have emerged due to an advanced understanding of the science of learning. Each one is presented in terms of the five dimensions of the framework.
Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2018
This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen sc... more This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed 'citizen inquiry', which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, 'citizen inquiry', by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time.
Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (... more Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (mass participation citizen science and learning to be a scientist through scientific inquiry, , and a concern to involve participation by the members of a community for community purposes. We describe the work we have done on this topic developing from our initial experiments in supporting inquiry learning with school children using technology and describing how this work has developed through conducting a number of studies involving students in a university technical college, and distance education students, then widened into investigation of the ideas with members of the public conducting citizen inquiries. These experiences have been supported by the development of the web platform nQuire () which is now the basis of our work. Our approach to citizen inquiry is driven by a concern for the nature of the participation from which members of the public can benefit and goes beyond involving people solely as volunteer data collectors. We report here on our experiences of the different types of inquiries or missions which have run on the platform since 2018, and the views of some participants on their involvement. We also discuss the issues in developing our vision of community citizen science inquiry and a potential centre for democratising research.
Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
We outline the features of an initiative to improve the inclusivity and transparency of research ... more We outline the features of an initiative to improve the inclusivity and transparency of research by using methods utilized by the citizen science community to develop participation in research projects by members of the public. Our aim is to transform the prevalent approach to public participation in such projects from the limited roles of data provider or data analyst and extending roles to that of co-researcher or stakeholder. We describe our approach to citizen science inquiry and discuss how it forms the basis of our intention and plan to advance the democratization of research. A pilot project of the approach is described. Challenges in the approach are outlined.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This ninth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a widespread influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK, collaborated with researchers from the Artificial Intelligence and Human Languages Lab/Institute of Online Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University. A long list of new educational concepts, terms, theories and practices was proposed and then pared down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice. Finally, ten sketches of innovative pedagogies were compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources, and they are summarised below. It can also enable comparisons between word usage or concepts in different languages to help develop cultural awareness. Researchers maintain that there is a need for more corpora that are accessible, diverse and adaptable for language instruction. 5. A therapist chatbot ('Sometimes you need to talk things through, but everyone seems to have an opinion or analysis of your situation. All you need is someone who will listen and ask the right questions to help you figure things out. That's Wysa'
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactiv... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This eighth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (UK) collaborated with researchers from the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. We proposed a long list of new educational concepts, terms, theories, and practices and pared them down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation. Debates around AI increasingly focus on what is unique to humans that we need to preserve and perhaps amplify. It is often argued that critical thinking and creativity are uniquely human. Aspects of communication and collaboration are also (still) uniquely human, such as the ability to appreciate a humorous remark, or to work towards a solution to a problem by conducting several conversations across multiple media.
Citizen science is a growing trend in involving the public in different types of collaboration wi... more Citizen science is a growing trend in involving the public in different types of collaboration with scientists. The growth of this activity has consequences for data collection, data analysis and the way in which science is carried out. It also has a potential impact on what, and how, citizen scientists learn about science when engaged in such activities. The purpose of this research is to explore the practices adopted by participants in citizen science projects, and in particular the influence on learning for the participants in these projects which rely on technology to support collaboration. The growth of citizen science projects is occurring at the same time as a growth of interest in informal learning and both are supported by technology enhanced learning. To make best use of the rapidly growing area of citizen science in the development of learning, it needs to be studied as a newly developing interdisciplinary area, with the consequence of unravelling the mechanisms by which ...
nQuire (nquire.org.uk) is an innovative citizen science (CS) platform for learning, developed at ... more nQuire (nquire.org.uk) is an innovative citizen science (CS) platform for learning, developed at the Open University UK in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It operationalizes the concept of ‘citizen inquiry’, that is the fusion of citizen science and inquiry-based learning. It enables members of the public to join or set up their own investigations or ‘missions’ to explore themselves and their environment. Each mission involves finding out about how CS works at scale and gaining insight into current issues such as personal wellbeing. An example of an nQuire mission is Gardenwatch; this is a survey of UK private gardens, produced by BBC Springwatch and the British Trust for Ornithology. Over 200,000 people completed surveys of their gardens on nQuire, as well as sharing their findings on social media. We are now researching how to capture and improve the impact of nQuire on citizens’ learning and engagement. Our vision is to educate the general public in...
This quality enhancement report recommends priority areas for university activity in relation to ... more This quality enhancement report recommends priority areas for university activity in relation to massive open online courses (MOOCs). It also identifies research questions that need to be addressed in future. It does this by bringing together all the published research work in this area that has been produced by UK academic partners associated with the FutureLearn MOOC platform from the launch of the first MOOC in 2008 until September 2016.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive... more This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learning
The 2018 and 2019 AIED conferences workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Was an important but only ... more The 2018 and 2019 AIED conferences workshop ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Was an important but only a first step towards addressing the far-reaching ethical questions raised by the field of AIED. The reality is that, although there are encouraging signs, most AIED research, development and deployment continues to take place in what is essentially a moral vacuum. In short, still today, little research has been undertaken, no guidelines have been provided, no policies have been developed, and no regulations have been enacted to address the specific ethical issues raised by the application of AI in educational contexts. For these reasons, for the EC-TEL 2019 conference, we proposed a third ETHICS in AIED: Who Cares? Workshop. This built on the outcomes of the previous workshops (which includes a journal paper and commissioned book). It was an opportunity for researchers who are exploring AIED ethical issues to share their insights, to identify key ethical issues, to map out how to address...
This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnersh... more This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnership between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance. Informed by action research, this four-year project was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed school-university engagement with research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. Through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students. We therefore introduced a flexible and adaptable framework of four types of activity—open lectures, open dialogues, open inquiry and open creativity—combined with an upstream approach to planning based on a set of six principles. A sub-set of these activities were evaluated through a c...
The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for de... more The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for decades. Following the disruption arising from Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a move to remote teaching in universities across the world. This move has put the transformation or digital revolution in the limelight in the media. TEL is of strategic importance to the conduct of teaching, learning and research in education internationally. TEL, when combined with the growing benefits of open approaches to education, leads to a potentially transformational means of learning. In this paper the authors introduce some examples of research projects from the Open University’s OpenTEL research grouping. These examples highlight some of the work conducted relating to supporting students, universities, and communities using TEL during the pandemic. OpenTEL research has identified that Covid-19 has exposed the need for better institutional support for students who are facing stress and disruption in...
International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 2020
The purpose of most citizen science projects is engaging citizens in providing data to scientists... more The purpose of most citizen science projects is engaging citizens in providing data to scientists, not supporting citizen learning about science. Any citizen learning that does occur in most projects is normally a by-product of the project rather than a stated aim.This study examines learning outcomes of citizens participating in online citizen science communities purposely designed for inquiry learning. The 'Citizen inquiry' approach adopted in this study prioritises and scaffolds learning and engages people in all stages of the scientific process by involving them in inquiry-based learning while participating in citizen science activities. The exploratory research involved an intervention with two design studies of adult volunteer participants engaging in citizen-led inquiries, employing a mixed-methods approach. The findings indicated that, in both design studies, participants engaged in an inquiry process, and practised inquiry skills alongside other kinds of knowledge and skills not directly related to science. Differences between the outcomes of each study highlighted the importance of the design on learning impact. In particular, participant understanding of research processes and methods, and developing more experimental studies were more evident with the support of a dynamic representation of the inquiry process. Furthermore, in the second study, which was hosted in a more engaging and interactive learning environment, participants perceived science as fun, were involved in inquiry discussions, and showed progress in scientific vocabulary. The paper concludes with some considerations for science educators and citizen science facilitators to enhance the learning outcomes of citizen inquiry and similar online communities for science inquiries.
Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages o... more Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages of the scientific research, mostly data collection and processing. They are less likely to have an explicit objective to support and promote volunteers' learning. In response to that, “citizen inquiry” emphases citizens' learning and community education, by viewing CS as an opportunity to educate the general public in thinking and acting scientifically. In citizen inquiry, citizens can take part in all the stages of the scientific research, from setting up an inquiry of personal interest, to deciding on the methods of data collection, analysis, and reporting. To ensure data quality when non-professionals design their own or take part in existing investigations, we have designed a bespoke online technological solution, the nQuire platform (nquire.org.uk), with support from the Open University/BBC partnership. nQuire scaffolds the design of high quality scientific inquiries through ...
Educational visions: The lessons from 40 years of innovation, 2019
The first joint project undertaken by the Computers and Learning research group was the evaluatio... more The first joint project undertaken by the Computers and Learning research group was the evaluation of The Open University Science Faculty's CAL offering in 1979. Since then many CALRG activities such as PhD projects, major external research grants, and institutional contributions, have been directed towards a better understanding of what makes science teaching and learning better. In this chapter we will consider our work on conceptual change in science and on the development of pedagogy and technology on personal inquiry using nQuire, and include work integrating these developments into the Open Science Laboratory. Our work has included evaluation of other innovative pedagogical supports such as the Puck-Land simulation for teaching Physics, Virtual Field Trips and the use of the Virtual Microscope both in the UK and a number of other UK and EU universities. We illustrate how judicious use of technology and pedagogy can promote enthusiastic engagement with science and give opportunities for participation and learning.
Supporting immigrant language learning on smartphones: A field trial. Studies in the Education of... more Supporting immigrant language learning on smartphones: A field trial. Studies in the Education of Adults, 49(2) pp. 228-252. For guidance on citations see FAQs.
There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and com... more There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability. What is negotiable is how best to achieve the development of those skills, in particular which teaching and learning approaches are suitable for facilitating or enabling complex skills development. In this paper, we build on our previous work of exploring new forms of pedagogy for an interactive world, as documented in our Innovating Pedagogy report series. We present a set of innovative pedagogical approaches that have the potential to guide teaching and transform learning. An integrated framework has been developed to select pedagogies for inclusion in this paper, consisting of the following five dimensions: (a) relevance to effective educational theories, (b) research evidence about the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogies, (c) relation to the development of twenty-first century skills, (d) innovative aspects of pedagogy, and (e) level of adoption in educational practice. The selected pedagogies, namely formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with drones, learning with robots, and citizen inquiry are either attached to specific technological developments, or they have emerged due to an advanced understanding of the science of learning. Each one is presented in terms of the five dimensions of the framework.
Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2018
This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen sc... more This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed 'citizen inquiry', which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, 'citizen inquiry', by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time.
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Papers by eileen scanlon