Following consultation with our industry partners we are happy to announce our year three research topics, outlined below. The topics address real issues for edtech that require innovative solutions.
Assessment 2020
The introduction of the reformed Junior Cert programme in Ireland is evidence of the global paradigm shift occurring in education. Students’ needs for 21st century skills are the main driver of this sea change, with much research already invested in areas like collaboration, analysis, synthesis and critical thinking.
The shift in learning requirements has also led to recognition of a need for a change in assessment methods, because many of these skills are not as easily measured as traditional knowledge or comprehension learning.
Here at Learnovate, we are shaping our Assessment 2020 project to address some of these key challenges, highlighted by our industry partners as a critical area for development.
The project will focus on new assessment models, looking at techniques that move away from explicit, traditional methods of assessment towards implicit, continuous assessment models incorporating multiple evidence sources. We will seek to develop tools to visualise and assess, behaviours and skills, which have eluded the assessment process to date.
Business Competence Analytics
The nature of learning and development functions within most organisations, large and small, has undergone a radical change in very recent times. The onus of learning and development is shifting to each business unit, leading to more agile, informal and peer to peer occurrences of learning.
Organisations believe this method is an improvement on more traditional course learning, but management and business unit managers require more effective means of visualizing the improvements.
The reality is that the evidence for improvement also needs to be related directly to existing core competencies of the organisation. This project seeks to establish a service in which day to day learning and on-the-job activity is recognised and translated into real-time, meaningful visualisations of core competences.
Interoperability and Reuse
Content analysis, interoperability and reuse is a constant challenge for our industry partners. A common hurdle is the time, effort and cost involved in surfacing, re-engineering and re-purposing vast amounts of valuable, legacy learning materials from more traditional formats. This applies across K-12, Higher Education and Corporate learning landscapes.
At Learnovate, we have already generated a set of valuable research outputs in this space. This project will seek to leverage these outputs and place them in the context of the most recent developments in, for example, industry performance tracking standards such as TinCan. We will also develop an approach and prototype implementation of how such technologies can be packaged (via reference APIs and models) for agile and easy adoption within industry platforms
