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TEL 1 Seminar Programme

ANNOUNCEMENT OF FORTHCOMING ESRC/EPSRC CALL FOR RESEARCH ON TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING

Understanding, creating, and exploiting digital technologies for learning

The ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) is collaborating with the EPSRC and the e-Science Core Programme to extend its work into developing the new research field of ‘technology enhanced learning'. This announcement advises potential applicants of the initiative.

By its nature, technology enhanced learning (TEL) requires interdisciplinary collaboration across the disciplines of learning, cognition, information and communication technologies (ICT) and education, and broader social sciences. Research proposals will build on findings from teaching and learning research and innovative ideas from research on digital technologies in constructive processes of engagement and mutual development.

To achieve the highest ambitions for education and lifelong learning we need to exploit fully what new technology offers – for personalising learning and improving outcomes, for including more learners in education and lifelong learning, for creating more flexible learning opportunities and for improving the productivity of learning and knowledge building processes. But to do this, we need a more explicit understanding of the nature of learning itself, both formal and informal, and the way it is responding to changes in society and the opportunities created by new technologies.

The call will explicitly recognise the need for a new research field defined in terms of learning technologies and their application. The ESRC TLRP is building our knowledge of how to improve teaching and learning across all the phases of formal and informal education across the lifecourse. Other EPSRC research programmes are developing innovative digital technologies to support knowledge development and human interaction. This new research initiative will support innovation from both research areas, each challenging the other, to rethink ways of making learning more effective and to develop the new technology solutions to make that possible. Such interdisciplinary research is intended to help build new understandings of how technology can enhance learning.

ESRC, EPSRC and the e-Science Core Programme have provided approximately £6m funding for an initial four years to support a limited number of large, adventurous teams or consortia (approximately 3-5, with awards up to £1.5m FEC). Additionally, a number of small six-month development networks (up to £60k FEC) will be funded, in anticipation of a second round of the competition, for which additional support is being discussed with potential co-funders.

The call will be published on the ESRC website ( http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk ) on 13 March, with a deadline of 12 May for outline proposals for large awards and full proposals for developmental awards. The initiative will be launched through three briefing and networking events in London , Edinburgh and Cardiff (see below).

Applications for funding should involve interdisciplinary research teams in collaboration with partners in other education and/or training organisations and technology design organisations, as appropriate. Teams, may be, but will not be required to be, multi-institutional.

The research areas that require collaboration across the social/educational and technical/computing research communities will include, for example, the development of naturalistic and multimodal interfaces to support distributed and mobile communities of learners, an open architecture for TEL systems, dynamic user modelling to improve personalisation.

The overall challenges to this new research community will be to develop innovative applications of digital technologies that will contribute to making education and lifelong learning more personalised, inclusive, flexible, and productive:

Personalised: Transforming the quality of teaching and the learning experience by exploiting the responsive and adaptive capabilities of advanced digital technologies to achieve a better match with learners' needs, dispositions and identities.

Inclusive: Improving the reach of education and lifelong learning to groups and individuals who are not best served by mainstream methods.

Flexible: Enabling the provision of education and skills to be deployed in more open, variable, and accessible ways, so that learning opportunities are available in a more seamless environment that can link classroom, home, workplace, and community

Productive: Achieving higher quality and more effective learning in affordable and acceptable ways

Outline and Developmental Proposals will be assessed by a specialist Commissioning Panel comprising of nominees from the ESRC and the EPSRC. Invited Full Proposals will be assessed by both external peer reviewers and the Commissioning Panel. Representatives of funding bodies will attend the Panel meetings in a non-voting capacity.

For further academic information, please view:

http://www.tlrp.org/tel

Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) will be provided within the Virtual Research Environment (see below).

After publication of the call on 13 th March, members of the TLRP e-team can provide advice on proposals. They may be contacted as follows:

Dr Richard Cox ( richc@sussex.ac.uk )

Professor Diana Laurillard ( d.laurillard@ioe.ac.uk )

Dr Lydia Plowman ( lydia.plowman@stir.ac.uk )

Professor Josie Taylor ( j.taylor@open.ac.uk )

General enquiries should be addressed to the TLRP Office at: tlrp@ioe.ac.uk

The Director of the TLRP is: Professor Andrew Pollard ( a.pollard@ioe.ac.uk )

Full details on how to apply, including guidance on access to and completion of Je-S forms, will be available on the ESRC site from 13 th March 2006 .

At each meeting, coffee will be available from 10.30 and the briefing will begin at 11.00. Lunch will be served at 12.45. In the afternoon, there will be opportunities to network with colleagues with interests in the particular TEL research challenges which are identified in this call: personalisation, inclusivity, flexibility and productivity. At the end of both morning and afternoon sessions, there will be Question and Answer opportunities. Each meeting will end no later than 3.30.

To register yourself and potential user or academic partners for a briefing meeting, please send the following details for each person to: James O'Toole ( j.o'toole@ioe.ac.uk ).

If places become oversubscribed, they will be allocated on ‘first come, first served'.

For more information and access to the e-discussion forum, a new worksite area on the TLRP Sakai VRE has been created called 'Technology Enhanced Learning Call'.

Existing TLRP VRE users can join it using the 'Membership' function under ‘my workspace'.

New TLRP VRE users (eg: potential grant proposers etc who wish to read the FAQ, participate in Q&A sessions, etc) should access the TLRP VRE at http:// groups.tlrp.org/ and select 'New Account' (nb. there is no ‘www' in the web address).

When signed up, please click on ‘Membership' to join the 'Technology Enhanced Learning Call' worksite. Then click 'Joinable Sites', followed by a click on 'Join' under the 'Technology Enhanced Learning Call' worksite description.

This causes a TEL Call tab to be added to the top of your VRE page. Click on the tab to enter the worksite area.

The TEL Call worksite area contains a 'Frequently Asked Questions' section, which will be developed responsively.

A Word version of this Announcement can be downloaded here.