Eileen Scanlon

The Open University · Institute of Educational Technology

The Banbury My Life My Choice Self-Advocacy Group, Jessica Carr and three supervisors worked together to research how people with learning disabilities do citizen science. As a research group, we made our own citizen science project exploring an issue of relevance and interest to us. Using creative research methods, we learnt about research skills...

The announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN marked a groundbreaking achievement in Mode 1 'discovery science'. We combined analyses of CERN strategic documents and organisational structures with ethnographic observations of, and interviews with, communication professionals. Our findings show that promotion of this 'Mode 1' discover...

This twelfth report proposes ten innovations which have the potential to exert a greater influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University (UK) collaborated with researchers and practitioners from the LIVE Initiative at Vanderbilt University in the US. A wide range...

Innovating Pedagogy 2024 Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

Community citizen science inquiry is a combination of two ideas: first, citizen science inquiry (mass participation citizen science and learning to be a scientist through scientific inquiry, (Herodotou et al, 2017), and a concern to involve participation by the members of a community for community purposes. We describe the work we have done on this...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This eleventh report proposes another ten innovations. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University, UK, collaborated...

This paper examines the pedagogical integration of Virtual Microscopes (VMs) in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), to identify best practice and improve online pedagogy. It has captured the perspectives of 12 Health and Earth Science university teachers, through in-depth interviews, about the current integration of the VM in online teaching, ben...

This is the tenth report in a series of reports exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment. It proposes ten promising innovations for a post-pandemic world of education: hybrid models, dual learning scenarios, pedagogies of microcredentials, pedagogy of autonomy, watch parties, influencer-led education, pedagogies of the home, pedagog...

This book analyses higher education's digital transformation and potential disruption from a holistic point of view, providing a balanced and critical account from a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints. It looks at case studies on educational and emerging technology, their impact, the potential risk of digitalization disrupting higher education...

The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for decades. Following the disruption arising from Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a move to remote teaching in universities across the world. This move has put the transformation or digital revolution in the limelight in the media. TEL is of strategic impo...

This chapter describes citizen inquiry (citizen science with inquiry-based learning) as a digital participatory research method, and discusses the affordances of a range of participatory technologies used to support it.

Citizen science or community science (CS) programmes are engaging volunteers in specific stages of the scientific research, mostly data collection and processing. They are less likely to have an explicit objective to support and promote volunteers' learning. In response to that, “citizen inquiry” emphases citizens' learning and community education,...

This paper explores the development of educational technology research over the last 50 years. This is done by considering what has influenced this development and what are current trends. The issue is further explored by considering what influence these trends have had on the development of distance learning pedagogy, especially for the education...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This ninth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a widespread influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Ins...

The purpose of most citizen science projects is engaging citizens in providing data to scientists, not supporting citizen learning about science. Any citizen learning that does occur in most projects is normally a by-product of the project rather than a stated aim. This study examines learning outcomes of citizens participating in online citizen sc...

Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

In this paper, we discuss the nature of interdisciplinarity and, in particular, the ways that interdisciplinary working is enacted in TEL Research. Following a design-based research approach, a common TEL methodological approach, we identified how interdisciplinarity facilitated the research team to address a wicked problem, fostered dialogue betwe...

There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability. What is negotiable is how best to achieve the deve...

This paper addresses the related issues of which pedagogies improve with scale and how to develop a novel platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper begins by introducing pedagogy-informed design of platforms for learning at scale. It then summarizes previous work to develop a platform for open science investigations. Then, it introduces...

New forms of data, data visualisation and human interaction with data are changing radically and rapidly. As a result, what it means to be data literate is also changing. In the big data era, people should not simply be passive recipients of data-based reports. They need to become active data explorers who can plan for, acquire, manage, analyse, an...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This seventh report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the I...

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about thedesign of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterativepedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based andmobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. Thedesign involved an exp...

Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner’s needs, or individual feedback on a student’s assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attra...

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are becoming commonplace in Higher Education. Amongst the latest VLE developments is the design and use of Virtual Microscopes (VMs) that allow for viewing and manipulation of online images by multiple students. Although students are found to be generally satisfied with the use of VMs, it is yet not known what t...

This paper explores the influence of the concept of interdisciplinarity on the work of educational technologists and others involved in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) research. There is a growing recognition of the need for interdisciplinarity in solving complex research problems in many areas of science. Technology-enhanced learning is a relat...

In this paper we consider the role of sharing evidence online in work in progress to develop a new teaching framework for distance and part-time students of The Open University. The work reported here looks at the motivation for applying evidence and how it can act to support the development of the framework, rather than the framework itself. The a...

In this paper we explore the role of theories in current practice in educational technology. We review a range of writings from the past 30 years on the nature of learning technology research. We discuss influences on learning technologies from the related fields of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). W...

This paper considers the impact of changes in the landscape of scholarly communication on the activities of academics. These changes are considered through the lens of the practices examined by educational technology academics at the Open University who have conducted a number of related research projects under the theme of digital scholarship. Thi...

This paper discusses a UK field trial of the European funded MASELTOV project, which developed a suite of smartphone tools and services (the ‘MApp’) to help immigrants’ language learning and social inclusion in four European cities. The paper reports on interview data and social forum use. Our findings suggest that the MApp helps immigrants with th...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of...

We present five design guidelines that we have developed from issues identified during our usability evaluations in a sensor-based citizen inquiry project. These have been compiled from existing literature, and after receiving feedback on use of the mobile application from participants through forum comments and survey responses, statistical analys...

Digital technologies are profoundly social in use. They are developed and defined by participants who learn through iterative processes of participation. This is the case with online citizen science projects. Typically, scientists propose a way of conducting their research in a distributed fashion. They seek out experts in information and communica...

As with other online communities, it is important to design elements of citizen inquiry projects that will attract and engage members. This chapter describes the process of designing an online community for citizen inquiry. It builds on design principles of inquiry learning, citizen inquiry and other online communities. The ‘Weather-it’ citizen inq...

Citizen Inquiry: Synthesising Science and Inquiry Learning is the first book of its kind to bring together the concepts of citizen science and inquiry-based learning to illustrate the pedagogical advantages of this approach. It shifts the emphasis of scientific investigations from scientists to the general public, by educating learners of all ages...

The authors describe the design and formative evaluation of a sensor toolkit for Android smartphones and tablets that supports inquiry-based science learning. The Sense-it app enables a user to access all the motion, environmental and position sensors available on a device, linking these to a website for shared crowd-sourced investigations. The aut...

Citizen participation in online communities of scientific investigations has recently become more popular. Enhancing the engagement of citizens within these communities is a focus of attention for researchers and practitioners who want to amplify the impact on learning, science and society. This study investigates the relationship between engagemen...

The development of online distance learning and the early years of the recent MOOC phenomenon leads to a mix of lessons from experience and emergent findings from studies in new contexts that require further reflection and research. Seven issues are identified from this combination each of which require attention to allow evidence-based practice in...

Personalisation of learning is a recurring trend in our society, referred to in government speeches, popular media, conference and research papers and technological innovations. This latter aspect—of using personalisation in technology‐enhanced learning (TEL)—has promised much but has not always lived up to the claims made. Personalisation is often...

During the last eight years, interest in massive open online courses (MOOCs) has grown fast and continuously worldwide. Universities that had never engaged with open or online learning have begun to run courses in these new environments. Millions of learners have joined these courses, many of them new to learning at this level. Amid all this learni...

Heritage language education is distinct from the field of second language acquisition due to having the concept of identity always at its core (Leeman et al., 2012). This paper draws on this concept and presents an action research study focusing on teaching and learning of Greek as a heritage language in the context of Supplementary Education in th...

This paper describes an approach to working in educational technology informed by the recognition of the subject as a major current site for interdisciplinary activity. Currently the most popular term for educational technology embraced in the UK and in the EU is Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). We draw on the literature on interdisciplinary and...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are changing the contours of the teaching and learning landscape. Assessment covers an important part of this landscape and may be a key driver for learning. This paper presents preliminary results of a qualitative study that investigated learners’ views on assessment types within a MOOC. A thematic analysis of l...

While Citizen Science projects involve people in passive or active project tasks, Citizen Inquiry offers the opportunity for deeper involvement through initiating and facilitating science investigations. This study aims to explore the creation and evolution of Weather-it, a Citizen Inquiry online community hosted by the nQuire-it platform. Weather-...

We describe a toolkit for Android smartphones and tablets that enables a user to access all the sensors available on the device. Data from individual sensors can be viewed as dynamic graphs. Output from one or more sensors can be recorded to a spreadsheet, with the sampling rate set by the learner. As a tool for inquiry learning, the sensors can be...

Purpose: The development of a game based approach to improving the decision-making capabilities of financial traders through attention to improving the regulation of emotions during trading. Design/methodology/approach: The project used a design-based research approach to integrate the contributions of a highly inter-disciplinary team. The approac...

Citizen inquiry is an innovative informal science learning approach, which engages members of the general public in scientific investigations sparked by their personal experience of everyday science, and to which other members can contribute. This paper aims to describe the network of interactions and contributions of Weather-it, an online Citizen...

Social inclusion of recent immigrants is a challenge in many countries for both immigrants and the host communities. To harness the potential of social, situated and opportunistic mobile interactions for the social inclusion of immigrants in a host country, we have developed an Incidental Learning Framework. This supports the design and evaluation...

The area of learning has a justifiable claim to be a special case in how it can be enhanced or supported by technology. In areas such as commerce and web design the aim is usually to ensure efficiency and support specific actions such as purchasing or accessing information as quickly and easily as possible. Working with technology for the purpose o...

Although the motivating role of feedback and progress indicators is understood in formal learning, their role in supporting incidental mobile learning is less well understood. In this paper we argue that well-designed feedback and progress indicators (FPIs) offer guidance and structure that may encourage mobile app users to move from fragmented lea...

The design of learning materials and researching their efficacy involves the application of both theoretical learning principles and ways of working or practices to move towards evidence based improvement. This paper abstracts 4 categories from our on-going work of educational technology research which we have found to be important in considering w...

Aim. This article presents a model of how gaming involvement and informal learning come together in practice. Method. Based on a series of interviews, case studies, and a wider survey, the Gaming Involvement and Informal Learning (GIIL) framework indicates how involvement with a variety of gaming practices can lead to a range of different learning...

Game developers have to ensure their games are appealing to, and playable by, a range of people. However, while there has been interest in the game-play experience, we know little about how learning relates to player involvement. This is despite challenge being an integral part of game play, providing players with potential opportunities to learn....

Smartphones, as highly portable networked computing devices with embedded sensors including GPS receivers, are ideal platforms to support context-aware language learning. They can enable learning when the user is en-gaged in everyday activities while out and about, complementing formal language classes. A significant challenge, however, has been th...

Although the motivating role of feedback and progress indicators is understood in formal learning, their role in supporting incidental mobile learning is less well understood. In this paper we argue that well-designed feedback and progress indicators (FPIs) offer guidance and structure that may encourage mobile app users to move from fragmented lea...

The Inquiring Rock Hunters project is an example of Citizen Inquiry. Adult citizens designed and ran their own investigations in geology, through the online platform called nQuire, while collaborating with scientists. Analysis of the investigations shows patterns of collaboration and mentoring between novice, intermediate and expert geologists, how...

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students aged 11-14. This differs...

Networked learning is becoming more and more about connectivity of learners or professionals and connectivity to resources available online and sometimes freely. Researchers are making use of these by designing online environments where this notion of connectivity and vast resources available to learners can be exploited. Many online discussion too...

Informal participation in science is being recognized as an important way of developing science learning both for children and adults. Mobile learning has particular properties that have potential in informal science settings, particularly outside traditional educational settings. Mobile technologies provide new opportunities for learners to engage...

Informal participation in science is being recognized as an important way of developing science learning both for children and adults. Mobile learning has particular properties that have potential in informal science settings, particularly outside traditional educational settings. Mobile technologies provide new opportunities for learners to engage...

This paper discusses learning at scale from the perspective of two UK Universities engaging in technology enhanced learning. Three case studies are used to illustrate ways in which scale has been achieved. There is diversity in how scale is supported but also common factors. Openness and choice appear as enablers in all cases.

This paper explores the impact of the digital age on the work life of academics and reports research on how and whether technologies are facilitating and adapting the teaching and research practices of academics, offering a description of scholarship for the digital age. A changed landscape is emerging, which offers academics new ways of working in...

This paper discusses how the particular features of mobile learning can be harnessed to provide new informal learning opportunities in relation to context aware and location based learning. The MASELTOV project is developing representations of an incidental learning framework to enable software developers and researchers to both design and analyse...

This chapter presents a description of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), their brief history and some examples. Then the chapter focuses on online learning and how research on distance education can be used to inform the design of these courses. In particular, the authors consider research in the following areas: improving learner experience, on...

Support for nontraditional students, team-based quality control, and assessment design are critical.

Timely and appropriate feedback and indicators of progress can motivate learners. Mobile learning poses a challenge to established instructional strategies with respect to delivering feedback and monitoring learner progress, particularly in informal and incidental learning occurring outside of formal structured learning environments. We argue that...

In this paper we analyse children’s talk with a view to understand how a technology enhanced inquiry learning toolkit played a part in enriching collaboration during a fieldtrip and facilitating social interaction. The participants in the study were 15 year-old students carrying out their geography GCSE (General Certificate in Secondary Education)...

Citizen Inquiry forms a new method of informal science learning and aims to enable the engagement of citizens in online scientific investigations. Citizen Inquiry combines aspects from Citizen Science and Inquiry-based learning and is implemented through a community of practice where people having a shared interest interact and exchange knowledge a...