Jon Mason

Standards for smart education – towards a development framework

Smart learning environments (SLEs) utilize a range of digital technologies in supporting learning, education and training; they also provide a prominent signpost for how future learning environments might be shaped. Thus, while innovation proceeds, SLEs are receiving growing attention from the research community, outputs from which are discussed in this paper. Likewise, this broad application of educational digital technologies is also the remit of standardization in an ISO committee, also discussed in this paper. These two communities share a common interest in, conceptualizing this emerging domain with the aim to identifying direction to further development. In doing so, terminology issues arise along with key questions such as, ‘how is smart learning different from traditional learning?’ Presenting a bigger challenge is the question, ‘how can standardization work be best scoped in todays innovation-rich, networked, cloud-based and data-driven learning environments?’ In responding, this conceptual paper seeks to identify candidate constructs and approaches that might lead to stable, coherent and exhaustive understanding of smart learning environments, thereby providing standards development for learning, education and training a needed direction. Based on reviews of pioneering work within smart learning, smart education and smart learning environments we highlight two models, a cognitive smart learning model and a smartness level model. These models are evaluated against current standardization challenges in the field of learning, education and training to form the basis for a development platform for new standards in this area.

Questions as Data: Illuminating the Potential of Learning Analytics through Questioning an Emergent Field

In providing a meta-analysis of a series of workshop papers and questions arising on the emergent field of learning analytics, this paper contributes to the ongoing formation of a shared research agenda. The first ICCE Learning Analytics workshop in 2014 demonstrated the effectiveness of a focused questioning session for collecting relevant data beyond the content of the papers themselves. In December 2014, approximately 40 participants attended the workshop held in Nara, Japan, and contributed to the collection of open research questions. Six papers were presented covering topics including scope; interoperability standards; privacy and control of individual data, extracting data from learning content and processes; and the development of conceptual frameworks. These papers established a base from which the group generated a set of questions that invite further investigation. Utilising the first stage of the Question Formulation Technique, a pedagogical approach designed to stimulate student inquiry, a prominent finding from the workshop that questions emerging from focused inquiry provide a useful set of data in their own right. With an explicit workshop focus on learning analytics interoperability, this paper reports on the emergent issues identified in the workshop and the kinds of questions associated with each issue in the context of current research in the field of learning analytics. The study considers the complexity arising from the fact that data associated with learning is itself becoming a digital learning resource while also enabling analysis of learner behaviours and systems usage.

Sense-Making, Mathematics, and Digital Technology

Human sense-making is a useful construct through which to examine some of the processes intrinsic to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Unlike sense-making of conversation where meaning-making is prominent, sense-making in mathematics can be a complex process that may not make sense in terms of the natural world we know, and therefore, has an impact upon the choice of abstractions used in teaching. Mathematical curiosity proceeds with logic yet also works with insight in discovering new mathematical horizons. This paper focuses upon the broad scope of human sense-making in mathematics. It considers theoretical and pedagogical issues and raises questions with regards to the effective use of digital technology in teaching and proposes a research agenda.