Greetings from the SEERNet team! 

We are dedicated to improving education research by facilitating collaborations among digital learning platforms, researchers, and practitioners. Over the past 9 months, we’ve been building the foundational infrastructure for this work. Most recently, we’ve focused our discussions on how SEERNet can help expand the diversity of the research community and also center educator voice so that we know the research questions being posed are meaningful to the field.

We are excited to engage with you and we’d love to hear your questions about SEERNet!

Welcome! I'm PI for SEERNet, and I'm super excited to (a) help you learn more about SEERNet and (b) to learn from you. What do you see as newsworthy here? What do you see as the issues or challenges that should be at the forefront of our thinking? Excited for our conversation!

And check our link for more info: SEERnet.org

jeremy

Hi Everyone! I'm Researcher on the SEERNet project. I'm focused on diversifying the research community and bridging the gap between research and practice by involving practitioner/educator voice. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on our work and possible collaboration. 

Hi Everyone! I'm Researcher on the SEERNet project. I'm focused on diversifying the research community and bridging the gap between research and practice by involving practitioner/educator voice. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on our work and possible collaboration. 

Hello, I am supporting the creation of one of the SEERNet platforms, excited to be a part of this larger group of innovators.

Hi Everyone,

I'm one of the CoPIs and am thinking about future-oriented scenarios for DLPs. A little more about this, we have today's SEER Principles and coming soon, a new one focused on equity. In the future, we want to ensure a strong equity focus, think about the kinds of research we can do in the different DLP systems, and think about how this research can better support practitioners and students who are in the education system.

Looking forward to your questions and comments.

Great work! Opening up and sharing the many DLPs we create as a field (and the data generated by them) to improve education research broadly is such an important effort. I know you're in the early stages of this project but I wonder if you've seen thinking or work happening across these DLPs yet? And if so, could you share some insights that emerged from thinking across two or more DLPs that might have been invisible when only thinking within only one platform?

SEERNet is a very exciting initiative, and the model you are developing for cross-platform collaboration may generalize beyond the specific organizations with which you are starting. In particular, at the AI-ALOE Institute we have many partners in adult learning who each have a digital platform they are using. We'd love to stay in touch about insights you are gaining to make the whole more than the sum of the parts.

Hi Chris, 

Thank you for joining our conversation. I just watched your video on AI-ALOE and definitely see opportunities for us to learn from one another. We are also considering large scale data sets, along with how to bring educator voice into the research process.

This is some really great work and I am thrilled to see this effort at integration and cross-fertilization. One thing I've noticed as I look at programs like this is that they tend to support larger scale, and more easily quantifiable work. I happen to prefer small scale, collaborative, qualitative studies. I wonder if you see ways that the platforms might expand in the future? Or if my impression is off and recent work has moved in that direction I'd love to hear more! Thanks! 

Hello,

I am the Director of Research at OpenStax and am excited for Kinetic by OpenStax to be a part of the SEERNet. Happy to take questions and/or suggestions.

Thanks,

Debshila

Hello,

I am the Director of Research at OpenStax and am excited for Kinetic by OpenStax to be a part of the SEERNet. Happy to take questions and/or suggestions.

Thanks,

Debshila

Hi -

Carnegie Learning is proud to be a part of SEERNet and is excited to continue supporting research through MATHia and UpGrade. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Hi -

Carnegie Learning is proud to be a part of SEERNet and is excited to continue supporting research through MATHia and UpGrade. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Hello!

I am the program officer at IES who manages the SEERNet investment, and I am excited to see the enthusiasm for this work on this thread. If you have any questions about this initiative, please feel free to reach out! 

Hi folks. It's fun to see familiar folks working on an important topic.

Judi alludes to this in her intro, and I suspect there is more information on these at the links she provided, but I would love video viewers to have an example of what kinds of improvements in both researcher and learner experience SEERnet could afford right here in this discussion.

Chris Dede also hinted at this, but what do the researchers, as well as Erin from IES, think about opportunities for creating (optional) data and API standards that might be picked up by other big learning platforms? Could this generate that kind of momentum? What would it take to do so?

Hi Josh,

I see your questions as "we need a movement" here, because SEERNet alone will not fully get us to every idea about the future you've suggested. I'll offer two examples from SEERNet and also talk about what's beyond it.

The Carnegie Learning work on Upgrade is actually a general API for conducting educational A/B experiments and NOT limited to Carnegie's own products. So you could use it to control other ed software. And its not as simple as A/B testing either -- there's a lot of smart thinking about educational research in Upgrade. Does this mean the future we see is A/B testing? Definitely that's too limited. On the other hand, its a clearly defined place where we can work on general APIs -- and lots of educational research is messy now.

OpenStax Kinetic has an idea flow like this "educational researchers use Qualtrix; Qualtrix is actually quite general in the experiences it can present to learners; what if we open a Qualtrix sized hole in every educational product?" You might think "surveys, yuck, I don't do survey research" -- but really you could provide other interactive experiences within Qualtrix that don't look so much like a survey. Do students comprehend science reading better when they have an interactive gizmo designed by a learning scientist?"

A different Josh, above, asks about qualitative research. My thought on this is "yes" -- the movement should not be about privileging quant research. Its about moving research closer to the large scale platforms that students already use for learning. Because today so little research gets into practice. Well, let's bring the research to where the practice lies.

Learning sciences was always meant to be applied, in "Pasteur's Quadrant." Finding ways to do research within major platforms could bring us closer to that vision.

jeremy

Thanks for this response, Jeremy.

I would extend the "we need a movement" to say that perhaps SEERnet is poised to lead and/or catalyze a movement.

Also, big thanks for the "yes" to qual research. While I appreciate that there are people doing quant work and I respect it as being able to paint parts of the pictures, I'm a qualitative research person.

And yes, Qualtrix is quite powerful & adaptable (though there's nothing wrong with surveys here and there). I like the idea of providing space in interfaces for "external" tools like Qualtrix, especially provided there's appropriate data linking.