Future directions of research and development in European educational technologies
Robert WhelanTETRISS: Telematics for Education and Training Intermediate Support Structure
and Ecotec Research and Consulting, Brussels
Future directions of research and development in European educational technologiesRobert WhelanTETRISS: Telematics for Education and Training Intermediate Support Structure and Ecotec Research and Consulting, Brussels | |
This article synthesises the current requirements and options for technological growth in European EU-funded research and technological development in the field of educational technology. These ideas were developed and reported by the expert working group in educational technologies created by the EU Commission and made up of specialists and professionals from each EU member state. These results of their meetings are presented in an abridged form and further details can be obtained from the author.After an overview of the context of the next planned phase of scientific EU RTD&D, the so-called 'Fifth Framework Programme', which has a global budget of 15Billion ECU, the future directions of research in the EU from 1999-2002 are discussed and the next generation of pedagogy, technology and multimedia tools and content development proposals are outlined. Various technologies' applications in education and training are discussed and compared.
This fourth theme is in turn composed of five key actions:
Education and training: systems, services and software enabling the development and demonstration of new methods using multimedia, broad-band communications, simulation and virtual reality for learning.
Interactive electronic publishing with new methods for creating and structuring publications; personalised dissemination of information and accessing scientific, cultural and other items through the networking of libraries, archives and museums.
New language technologies, including interfaces which help to make information and communications systems more user-friendly; advanced technologies for accessing, filtering, analysing and handling information to help manage the information explosion and facilitate the use of multimedia contents, including geographical information systems.
European research should focus on core learning issues that could lead to reliable, broadly generalisable results which are independent of the subject being learnt and of a specific learning environment. It is recognised however that some disciplines may require specific technical support systems. Consideration should be given to the four main components of a learning system: the learner, the teacher, the organisation and the content provider.
Basic research activities should also involve a range of disciplines that shed light on the nature of learning, reasoning and perception or play the role of enabling technology. Due to the very nature of basic research, it would be counter-productive to impose research tasks.
Visionary research, unlike basic research which is aimed at establishing a robust scientific base for educational technology, should try to anticipate qualitative changes that technology can bring in the coming decade to education and training. What could be the impact in the traditional classroom of replacing the old blackboard by a screen of the same size on which video, images and text can be displayed at the same time? What will be the impact of using highly intelligent devices in the building-up of pupils' mental models? What will be the impact of immersive virtual reality on learning? How, and to what extent can experiences developed in a virtual world be transferred and utilised in the real world?
The focus on quality, usability, access and choice is central to the programme. Technological innovation must match advanced pedagogic standards. Thus, new research and development is multidisciplinary: communities of educators, learners, scientists, industry and governments are encouraged to work together for the improved development of the knowledge society.
For the future, schools, universities, higher education institutions and industrial training organisations build or enhance their local as well as their wide area communications infrastructures, in principle, following a common scalable approach.
The vision in this direction should be a realistic European educational network with sufficient geographical distribution and high performance with communications software and hardware components expandable and amenable to experimentation by the users themselves. In summary, the perceived requirements of the actors - from the learner to the publisher- may be translated into a set of following objectives:
Research is needed to significantly improve the learning processes from the learning design to the learning delivery in order to achieve significant lasting and measurable learning gains at a predicted cost. R&D should address the core of the education process and not just technological add-ons.
Research is needed to improve the quality of multimedia educational material by better embedding best practices coming from pedagogical research, improving the reusability and the adaptability to the learners' needs. Developments are needed to support the authors and the publishers so they can easily access raw material and deliver products while protecting their rights.
All factors, technical, social, or organisational which could impact larger scale, progressive deployment should be understood. The diversity of learners, learning needs and learning contexts must therefore be recognised. The condition of development of learning communities, whether social, public or professional should be fully understood. Special attention should be devoted to professional development of all the actors engaged in education and training.
Equally important is to ensure equitable, universal access so that all European citizens have the right to access learning opportunities which provide them with the means for effective participation in society. This aim supports lifelong learners and non-formal learners with unprecedented requirements for flexible, technology-supported learning and training.
Pedagogical and cognitive research is active in a number of key concepts which are beginning to create models of learning which is radically different from the dominant model of the last century. It is impossible to make definite statements about any of those models and their capacity to bring educational gains when implemented with the support of technology. Research is needed to rigorously confirm the potential of these models through long-term, large-scale, carefully controlled experimentation in real-life environments.
None of those models and underlying theories pretend to cover all the facets of the learning process. Constructivism and situated learning focus on the active role of the learner engaged in real activities in building his or her knowledge base. The cognitive apprenticeship model (and the Vygotskian paradigm), the socialisation of knowledge theory and the collaborative learning or reciprocal teaching approach focus much more on group interactions. They may complement the constructivist approach by showing how to promote collaborative skills of the sort that are required in the contemporary work environment. Metacognitive learning gives more specific attention to the cultivation of higher-order thinking, including meta-cognition ( the acquisition of knowledge about how to learn).
As our understanding of learning, intelligent systems and information technologies grows, the need to integrate the knowledge and to apply it within a broad social context is growing even faster Interdisciplinary research on associated technologies can point to significant breakthroughs in understanding learning and cognition - from empirical research to classroom practice. Some long-term, high-risk but potentially highly rewarding research activities should be carried out by interdisciplinary teams with the objective to develop a broad understanding of adaptive learning behaviour which affects human learning and creation processes.
The school of the future
The classroom is first of all a social structure. A large scale use of learning technologies allowing learners to learn at their own pace, the networking of class-rooms will fundamentally change the social relations and in turn the whole school organisation. Carefully conducted experiments are needed to understand how to engineer the learning spaces in the schools of the future.
Integrating the school, community, industry and home environments through the use of interconnected networks will significantly change the relationship between the school and industry and parents. The very concept of community will change due to the removal of geographic boundaries. Parents will more easily become involved in their children's learning both at home and at school. The school to work transition will be facilitated through the use of mentors in the local industry learners will work in the industry while keeping in contact with their schools; the industry may act as a knowledge provider to the school. Experiments should be conducted for a better understand into the pedagogical, organisational and technical issues.
Research will clarify how science centres, museums, educational TV and libraries may significantly contribute to the learning process and be integrated into a school environment.
Integrating learning and working
Experiment in this area should focus on the specific aspects of work related learning: a very broad range of learner knowledge and skills, the need to accommodate a variety of physical settings such as the classroom, workplace and home. The strong request for a just-in-time, on-demand delivery and the specific difficulties in assessing the performance of the learner may also be targeted. Research will also cover issues related to the sharing of knowledge between collaborative team members, how to design the technology to promote such learning and mentoring attitudes.
Experimenting with virtual universities
The traditional universities are likely to focus their teaching on domains where teaching is backed by a strong research activity. In a situation where learning resources have to match learning demands, universities may become "learning brokers" enriching the distance courses offered by other institutions. Institutions of the future may even become a node and a gateway to a European and even global web of knowledge and skills. The broadband research network is able to provide an up-to-date facility to test this new scheme. Distance teaching institutions will have to scale-up their operations significantly to cope with increasing demand under these circumstances.
Supporting teachers and the trainers in their new roles
Two inter-related research issues need to be tackled in this area: Understanding the changes in the goals and the practice of teaching; and showing how technology can support the teachers in their new roles.
Other questions include: How can technology be designed to facilitate teachers' understanding of students' work? How can technology help in assessing collaborative learning and higher order thinking? How can a learning environment be customisable by the teacher and what are the best models for teachers' professional training? To speed up the research and development process it is important that more transparent methodologies are developed, discussed and shared in order to allow for an effective exchange of research results. In the same way, tools to develop experimental systems should be conceived as plug-and-play applications, more easily made available to the community of researchers.
Research on adaptable learning systems
The learning paradigm underpinning adaptable learning systems can be summarised in a three step procedure:
This in turn translates into three closely inter-related domain of research: Learner modelling, i.e. characterising a learner by including elements such a current knowledge, skills, abilities, learning styles and other personal information. Depending on the granularity, it may be used as an identity card to allow access to specialised courses, or as part of an Intelligent Tutoring System. The second is domain modelling, i.e. making it possible to translate learning goals into a range of topics to be addressed including for example a rich set of examples, hints and simulations; And thirdly, tutoring and assessment modelling.
Research in this area should focus on approaches that could support early reflections on standardisation issues and support research activities on learning software architecture.
Research on multi-user collaboration and interaction
Since a great deal of learning is accomplished as part of a social activity, research is needed to improve social interaction through the use of technology. Learners should be able to connect with other learners, teachers, colleagues or experts, to carry out several activities in a collaborative environment such as collaborative writing, multi-user control of a virtual laboratory and so on.
Research on authoring learning environment
Authoring tools for traditional computer aided learning including multimedia presentations are available on the market but these products do not facilitate the incorporation of instructional strategies nor the re-usability of learning material. In addition there are serious technical incompatibilities restricting the exploitability of courseware. New authoring tools should aim at producing open courseware that can be used in integrated learning environments and easily customised to fit the needs of particular groups of students. Open courseware architecture should be modular and allow separate content from pedagogical support.
Authoring learning environments should be investigated at different degrees of resolution from intelligent tutoring systems where all interaction with the system is monitored, to the actual design of curricula. This activity should address not only general purpose tools but also more specific ones like the authoring of intelligent simulations and of virtual environments.
Research on learning software architecture
There is a growing complexity of the software and tools supporting learning activities. These include: educational hypermedia, simulations, virtual environments, self-assessment tools, notebooks, communication with peers, with tutors, access to external resources, specialised tools like calculators and graphs and create the need for a software architecture. This architecture should be aimed at the integration of tools, and content regardless of the source and in-turn will enable decentralised development of educational software.
Organising and managing knowledge and other learning resources
Learning resources include content and tools but also people and services. The development of learning resources metadata will allow the users (learners, teachers, publishers) to easily locate, evaluate, access and manage on-line resources. This metadata should be linked or mapped to existing taxonomy and curricula structures in order to provide user-friendly access to the different users. Results should be widely disseminated and submitted to standardisation bodies.
Another issue is to aggregate and manage information from electronic sources into a knowledge base and according to users rules.
Development of domain-specific tools and multimedia content
In addition to generic tools and applications, some domain specific software and learners' support tools should be developed and experimented, for example multimedia in arts education, mathematics, sciences, language learning etc. These developments should be based on well-accepted domain specific (didactic) theories. Research should also address new approaches to improve the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Research on the evaluation of learning and teaching environments: Assessment support systems
There is a need to develop new methods for analysing and understanding new learning environments. This should be tackled at several levels: how to identify and remedy misconceptions in for example sciences, mathematics, grammar, how to assess the progress of students in terms of knowledge and skills acquisition and how to assess the performance of the global learning support system.
Importantly, research in this sector should be conducted in a manner and on a scale which provides stakeholders in the educational and training systems with scientific evidence of the efficacy, cost-effectiveness and scalability of the solutions being experimented with. This means that all experiments should be based on clearly described hypotheses allowing rigorous experimental testing and subjected to potential refuting.
The definition of a research agenda will not be complete without clarifying the way research projects of this kind should be conducted. Drawing on the Fourth Framework Programme experience in its attempt to involve the end-users and its focus on experimental services, several aspects of research and innovation should be taken into account by each project:
A breakthrough in the wide-scale implementation of educational technology depends further on the ability of fundamental R&D to integrate scientific progress in the understanding of learning and cognition. Thus, a timely multidisciplinary understanding of pedagogy, technology and users will lead to the development of applications which can actually promote better human learning.
The technologies driving the emerging knowledge society are evolving at dizzying speed. Indeed, in spite of the uncertainty when trying to predict the technologies of the future, the RTD&D in Europe will depend on a visionary grasp on wider trends in telecommunication infrastructures, computing, software and the way to conduct research in education and training psychology.
Some trends are clear:
This would include research on:
Earth-based Networks
The new network technologies to be include Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL) technologies, which allow a digital channel to be provided over an existing analogue telephone line.
The digital channel is provided in parallel with the existing telephone channel. Many telecommunications carriers have developed a strong interest in these technologies as a low cost method of delivering Video-on-Demand services to domestic premises but interest is now broadening to include the use of the technologies for Internet access. By contrast, cable modems allow a digital channel to be provided over existing analogue cable TV infrastructure. This technology is particularly relevant to cable TV providers and allows them to provide broadband digital access in parallel with existing cable TV services without the need to install new cabling.
New research into electricity supply modems has demonstrated the feasibility of providing broadband digital access over existing electricity supply cabling. This technology is clearly relevant to electricity supply companies who might be attracted to the possibility of a new business area offering low cost broadband Internet access. Also, mobile telephone networks utilising digital telephone networks (GSM) are growing rapidly in availability and bandwidth. Fixed wireless access can also be provided relatively quickly and cheaply and indeed in some countries it is possible for users to install their own short range radio links to provide inter-building and inter-site telecommunications channels. These facilities are cheap and easy to install and are of increasing interest to the education sector in the UK in particular.
Satellite Networks
In terms of non-terrestrial delivery networks, bi-directional satellite systems allow users and subscribers to transmit direct to the satellite from their premises, for both mobile and fixed installations.
As an example, EUTELSAT and ESA already provide a system enabling small Internet service providers to uplink their signal directly from their premises. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite telecommunication systems (GlobalStar, Iridium, ICO, Teledesic) are, by contrast, based on networks of low-earth orbit satellites aimed at providing the means for subscribers, worldwide, using hand-held telephones, to make use of voice, data, fax and paging services. These systems could provide Internet access to any point on the earth's surface. LEO constellations will also be able to provide a service for home or mobile learners, especially those in remote or sparsely populated areas that lack communications.
Geo-stationary digital television satellites offer millions of people in the footprint of the satellite the opportunity for simultaneously communication and information exchange, particularly in areas where the terrestrial infrastructure is poor. Because of this broadcast capability, satellites are well suited to tele-education. Lectures or educational TV programmes can be transmitted to schools or directly into the home where small and cheap "receive only" terminals can be installed.
It is important for European RTD&D to encourage these new technologies in order to provide much wider access to broadband networking at an early stage. Between 1999 and 2003, European research will help to enable the commercial sector's telecommunications operators, cable companies and electricity supply companies to participate in the provision of low-cost broadband network access services based on the aim of creating a pervasive and versatile European broadband education and research network. Development of a next-generation broadband network is essential for Europe.
In order for these developments to take hold and to facilitate education and training more effectively, an ongoing standardisation effort needs to be made in order to effectively use and manage these resources. The importance of this issue has been emphasised already.
| Robert Whelan Ecotec Research & Consulting, Brussels Robert_Whelan@ecotec.com Please cite as: Whelan, R. (1998). Future directions of research and development in European educational technologies. In C. McBeath and R. Atkinson (Eds), Planning for Progress, Partnership and Profit. Proceedings EdTech'98. Perth: Australian Society for Educational Technology. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/edtech98/pubs/articles/whelan.html |