In Washington, D.C. on May 3 and 4, 2017, Professor Mark Brown was invited to participate in a major EdTech Research Symposium which was part of a collaborative venture between the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, Digital Promise, and the Jefferson Education Accelerator.
As the Symposium website reports, the gathering hosted at Gallup’s World Head Quarters, represented the culmination of a year-long collaboration among stakeholders that rarely collaborate in support of education technology: academic researchers; entrepreneurs; district and university leaders; investors and philanthropists; and teachers and professors.
The Symposium Working Groups spent the past year collaborating to identify barriers, tackle complex challenges, and generate new insights to advance the field of edtech research and evaluation. Through surveys, interviews, and case studies, working groups explored issues such as how edtech decisions are made in K-12 and higher education and how companies and investors view and use research.
The Symposium Working Groups’ final reports summarize these findings and their implications for the role of efficacy research in the development, adoption, and implementation of edtech moving forward. The NIDL looks forward to some interesting research collaborations as a follow up to this event.
Digital Learning Dispatches 