Overview

The Educational Technology (Edutech) group explores emerging technological possibilities in the context of education. Our work combines software development with empirical research and modeling to provide working solutions to relevant real-world problems. The use of self-made software in real educational settings also creates an excellent opportunity for more theoretically oriented research that takes advantage of the great detail in which online activities can be observed.

Currently our main focus is on collaborative learning environments for higher education. We believe there is a lot of room for improvement both in the available tools and in the understanding of the relevant social and psychological phenomena. Our recent software includes a platform for accumulating shared document collections, flexible annotation tools for more effective collaboration, and a real-time visualization component for improving the atmosphere of a Web-based learning environment. In addition to the evaluation of the tools, our empirical research has examined the relationship of tool use to motivational profiles, learning styles, personality factors and educational outcomes. Please see the Applications and Publications sections for more information.

The ongoing development work aims at supplementing the current platform, OurWeb, with additional and improved features. Some of these are practically oriented enhancements to increase the immediate usefulness of the system, while others are related to our longer term research goals. The empirical work will be focussed on providing deeper analyses of the activities and collaboration taking place in the environment. Eventually, we hope to establish a close connection between our scientific and engineering pursuits, using empirical models as a basis for intelligent software.

The group is not active anymore, but related work is being done in another project.