Bridging Teaching and Learning Research and Practice

ELI is no longer actively pursuing this topic. This page is provided as an historical resource; it is not being updated or actively managed.

Definition and Importance of Key Theme

Through 2003, the NLII has focused on efforts use learning science to inform the selection and application of technology, through the key themes work on Learner-Centered Principles, Design & Practice. As NLII 2002 Fellow Colleen Carmean notes, "Educators, designers, technology providers, administrators, and theorists come to the teaching and learning territory with the same goals. Consensus in understanding is often hidden beneath different language, focus, experiences, understandings and practices." To address these differences and work toward a shared conceptual framework and common vocabulary for these different communities, Carmean developed a set of visual maps of the current learning territory, "Mapping the Learning Space." This site is meant to provide an entry into ideas and practices, and to provide an overview of the relationships between these areas in the higher education experience.

Educational research is potentially a great resource for supporting learner-centered practices, but there is a disjuncture between the worlds of the educational researcher and the practitioner (whether faculty member, instructional technologist, or learning designer). A few years ago at the International Conference on Learning Sciences held in Ann Arbor, keynote speaker Linda Roberts commented on a 500+ page proceeding, saying "This is fabulous, relevant, and meaningful work... the only problem is: no one who needs it is going to read it." That is, there is not much of a bridge between research and practice.

By the same token, the bridge for practice to inform theory is also absent. As Sue Gautsch, University of Southern California, argued in a presentation she gave at the NLII 2003 Annual Meeting, "While we know the vocabulary of learner-centered practices, we need to go deeper into the intersection between research and everyday practice so that we can absorb the findings of educational research and at the same time contribute to the findings of educational research." (See , "Towards the Learning Paradigm with Multi-Tiered Curricular Redesign Grants").

Practitioners have an opportunity to situate their own practice in a research and scholarship of teaching and learning context. Practitioners could build into their project designs (or pedagogical) components, such as transformative assessment, that help advance and transform the understanding of teaching and learning with technology. However, in order for this advancement to occur, we need structures that bridge individual and collective practice. Besides a shared conceptual framework, such structures include methodologies used in common across research and practice.

NLII Projects and Activities

The NLII is working with the Teaching and Learning Virtual Community of Practice to explore methodologies and models that integrate research, pedagogical practices, use of technology, and assessment practices into a framework that is accessible to both the practitioner and the researcher.

In addition, the NLII is working with Sue Gautsch, at the University of Southern California to develop a focus session in affiliation with the 6th Annual International Conference of Learning Sciences (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~icls/) which is being hosted in June, 2004, by University of California, Los Angeles. The intention is to work with representatives from the research and practitioner communities to seek multiple ways of describing and explaining learning in complex settings and to devise a set of processes and mechanisms to help bridge the often parallel universes of teaching/learning with technology practices in higher education (academic technologies) and teaching/learning theory (educational research.) We will explore how together, practitioners and researchers might develop some shared language and communication pathways.