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New Cyberlearning Community Report: Five Great Reasons to Read It

Jeremy Roschelle

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Over the past five years, I’ve led the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF uses the term “cyberlearning” for its portfolio of research projects that investigate emerging technology and emerging learning sciences. The projects seek bold new designs for learning, contrasting with today’s typical laptop- or tablet-based apps. For example, cyberlearning designs for learning may incorporate speech or gesture recognition, leverage mobile devices and mapping tools, or transform a familiar space into a virtual field site for a collaborative scientific investigation.

NSF has made more than 250 cyberlearning research grant awards over the past five years. A big challenge for the CIRCL team has been to answer questions like: What are cyberlearning investigators exploring? What are we learning from the research? What new questions about learning can we answer?

To address these questions, CIRCL gathered 22 authors, representing a range of different projects. We worked together intensively for over a year to write a “community report” in which the authors would help us to report on the designs, ideas and progress in the cyberlearning community. It wasn’t an easy process, but we eventually found a series of key commonalities with this large portfolio of exploratory research. By building on those commonalities, we could explain why cyberlearning research matters.

The result, called the “Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning with Technology,” was released on October 2, 2017 and is free to download here.

Here are five reasons why I’d recommend downloading and reading it:

  1. The report explains what cyberlearning is and sets it in the context of a history of learning scientists and computer scientists working together.
  2. It describes six “commitments” in this research community that drive the work forward and make it distinctive.
  3. It illustrates a set of promising new design genres, such as “virtual peers and coaches” and “digital performance spaces.” These designs shed light on how the next two decades of learning with technology may be very different from the last two decades.
  4. The researchers highlight advances in scientific methods that can drive this work forward, such as the ability to combine multiple, rich data streams to study how people learn and also advances in how we can involve learners and teachers in the design of learning.
  5. The report looks to the future, suggesting strategic “big ideas” that can serve as guideposts for a future of learning technology innovations that go far beyond what we have today.

The community report is available at: https://circlcenter.org/resources/community-report/

Authors

Jeremy Roschelle

Co-Executive Director, Learning Sciences Research

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Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D., serves as co-executive director of Digital Promise’s Center for Learning Sciences Research (CLSR) where he leads research on the future of learning with technology. He co-leads the NSF Engage AI Institute and leads the U-GAIN Reading R&D Center, both of which investigate advanced uses of AI in education. Dr. Roschelle is a Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and is internationally known for his work on artificial intelligence, computer-supported collaborative learning, learning mathematics with technology, and on scaling up research-based technologies. Over his 30+ year career, he has authored about 200 publications. His publications have about 28,000 citations and he holds 10 patents.

At Digital Promise, Dr. Roschelle oversees a dedicated group of researchers and learning scientists working to improve teaching and learning across preschool, PreK-12, and postsecondary programs. His focus is particularly on improving the infrastructure for generating research evidence and creating an infrastructure for learning-sciences-based applications of AI. Programs including SEERNet, AIMS EduData, and SafeInsights are creating state-of-the-art approaches to generating evidence on digital learning platforms. The K-12 AI Infrastructure Program is funding public goods, cultivating datasets, benchmarks and models that are grounded in the learning sciences.

Prior to joining Digital Promise, Dr. Roschelle led some of the most important research studies on the efficacy of technologies for learning mathematics. He is also well-known for his contributions to collaborative learning and his leadership of several national research hubs related to educational technology. Over the course of his career, he has secured and managed tens of millions of dollars in highly competitive external funding from federal agencies and global foundations. His research has contributed to policy, products, and into practical applications in schools. He also communicates about learning sciences research and AI directly to the public through his podcast, Future Fluent, and through his large following on LinkedIn.

Dr. Roschelle earned an bachelor’s degree in Computer Science  from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in learning sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He enjoys jazz, backpacking and photography.

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