This Episode aired at 5:30 pm EDT on Saturday March 26th
Mechanisms for Achieving Educational Visions with Drs. Barbara Means and Jeremy Roschelle
Where will the field of EdTech be in 5 years, globally? Our guests work at Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization that works across the intersections of educators, researchers, and innovators. Today’s speakers, Drs. Barbara Means and Jeremy Roschelle, will share their perspective from working with forward-looking networks of postsecondary and K-12 leaders. Dr. Mean leads a research-practice partnership with 5 college teams working on equity in digital learning and a national study of the impact of implementing courseware in introductory statistics classes. Dr. Roschelle leads CIRCLS.org and SEERNet.org, two networks focused on emerging technology for teaching and learning.
Dr. Means sees growing interest in understanding the most equitable and effective ways to blend independent online learning and synchronous class activities. Looking forward five years, she anticipates more collective decision-making around what gets taught and how it’s taught in core courses. Dr. Roschelle currently sees funding agencies, researchers and developers re-thinking how we conduct educational research given the rapid expansion of online digital learning in the past two years. Looking forward, he expects many more large-scale platforms to open up opportunities for educators and researchers to quickly design and test potential improvements. Both Means and Roschelle predict that rapid-cycle improvement research conducted by partnerships will overtake older and slower research approaches where EdTech insights take decades to transition from research to practice.
More about our guests below the video.
Episode Guests
Dr. Barbara Means, Executive Director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise, studies the effectiveness of innovative education approaches supported by digital technology. Currently, she is working with colleges and universities to redesign high-enrollment introductory courses to incorporate equity-minded pedagogy and digital learning technology in ways that enhance student engagement and course outcomes for low-income students and students of color. She also has been studying the equity impacts of the shift to remote instruction caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. Dr. Means has authored or edited more than a half dozen books related to learning and technology, including Learning Online: What Research Tells Us About Whether, When, and How. She has served on many study panels related to science education for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, including the panels that produced How People Learn I and How People Learn II. Dr. Means earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. You can reach Barbara at: bmeans@digitalpromise.org.
Dr. Jeremy Roschelle applies learning science theories and methods to understand how, when and why technology can enable improved teaching and learning. He is nationally and internationally recognized for groundbreaking research in computer-supported collaborative learning; learning with connected, mobile devices; and technology in mathematics learning. He has conducted rigorous efficacy research on personalized, adaptive learning, on online homework tools, and on dynamic visualizations for mathematics learning. His 25 years of research experience have led to over 125 publications and 9 patents, resulting in 15,000 citations to his contributions. Roschelle has a long-standing role as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Learning Sciences and leads a large community of National Science Foundation-funded projects in the area of cyberlearning. From his previous role as co-director of the Center for Technology in Learning with Dr. Means, he brings extensive experience in growing productive research organizations and leading complex, multi-institutional research and development teams funded by the National Science Foundation, Institute for Education Sciences, philanthropies and leading educational technology companies. You can reach Jeremy at: jroschelle@digitalpromise.org.