enorM

As a project within the framework of the “Science Year 2022 – Participate!”, enorM was divided into a mobilization phase and an interaction phase, in which the coordination office of the Leibniz Education Research Network participated.

During the mobilization phase, the project collected questions and ideas from students about learning in the future: at several local schools, via a broad social media campaign and, in particular, via the website lernen-von-morgen.de. At the online “Education Future Camp” on April 2, 2022 the submitted questions were organized and weighted together with interested students. In the subsequent interaction phase, the students interacted with researchers, met them online in “Book a Question” sessions, discussed with them at a hackathon and produced their own podcast series. In collaboration with an agency, a computer game – a digital escape room – was developed, which provides children and young people a completely different approach to learning in the future.

Students were also involved in this project: In a workshop with the agency, they helped develop the game idea and provided feedback on test versions during the production period. The computer game includes visualizations of the discussions between students and researchers as well as the podcast episodes. It is available on the website www.lernen-von-morgen.de beyond the project period.

The project serves the exchange and transfer of experiences from educational practice to research. In addition, the aim is to break new ground in science communication with new presentation and event formats.

Digi-EBF II

The meta-project (Digi-EBF II) is part of the Empirical Educational Research framework programme and the BMBF research focus ‘Digitalisation in Education’. It pursues the overarching goals of advancing research on education and digitalisation, making it visible and shaping it in collaboration with practitioners.

Coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), the project brings together the UDE, DIPF, DIE and IWM. The network sees itself as a service provider for the projects funded by the research centre, whose services are based on research findings that have already been obtained (Digi-EBF I) and are currently being collected (Digi-EBF II).

In Digi-EBF II, measures and practices of co-construction are identified, programmes are created to enable and shape transfer and own research is conducted to develop the challenges and potentials of co-construction and transfer in education. In the sense of design-oriented educational research, approaches to cooperation with the funded projects are reflected upon and discussed in reflection meetings and dialogue formats with educational practice and bridging actors and introduced into a broader discourse. The meta-project networks the funded projects with each other and within the research community on content-related, methodological and transfer-related topics. The state of research on practice-relevant issues relating to education and digitalisation is compiled in research syntheses, prepared in a practice-oriented manner and disseminated via appropriate channels. Accompanying these activities, various formats of knowledge transfer (dialogue formats, knowledge products and online portals) are researched and used.

AI2TEACH

The project investigates how the fundamental possibilities of digital learning contexts can be realised in a real school context.
AI-based adaptive, interactive systems enable a genuine improvement in learning through customised support. However, there has been little discussion to date about how individualised digital support can be meaningfully integrated into school lessons.
The project offers both the necessary technical expansion and systematic further training on digitally supported teaching and learning in English. As part of the project, the school-proven, AI-based tutor system Feedbook will be expanded to include an interface for teachers. This is intended to process the diverse information on the learning processes and individual competences of the pupils in a class in such a way that teachers receive the information they need to design lessons in a way that promotes learning in a short space of time.
Further training for teachers supports both the concrete use of such an interface in school practice and the learning psychology and methodological-didactic principles required for independent interpretation.

The effects of technology diffusion and narratives on firms and workers

This research project explores the diffusion and perception of digital technologies in the German labor market. We measure diffusion via information conveyed in online job vacancies and perception via media reports. Concentrating on emerging digital technologies, we stress both, their potentials, such as wage and employment growth, and pitfalls, such as inequality and biased narratives. Our analyses rely on novel text data, which we partially construct ourselves, and modern Machine Learning and NLP methods to analyze textual data. By combining our text data with survey and administrative information, we are able to shed light on the impact of digitalization on Germany’s labor market outcomes and educational decisions from different perspectives.

ReCo

The project “Automatic Response Coding” (ReCo) centers around text responses in tests. The computer programme ReCo automatically assesses whether a text response is correct, for example “The author aims at saving the trees.” as an answer in the PISA test. Moreover, ReCo extracts further features, for example whether a student adds knowledge to their response beyond the explicit information in the text.

The computer programme ReCo was originally developed at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the ZIB. In cooperation with both institutions, the Centre for Technology Based Assessment (TBA Centre) at DIPF is now developing the software package further. The project comprises the general software development as well as scientific studies employing ReCo. For this, TBA is responsible for the conceptual and technical development on the one hand and acts as the project manager for projects such as ReCo-Multi on the other hand. Also, TBA supports external research groups using the program.

OERinfo

The OER information centre offers a thematically specific online platform that provides the public at large and specialized target groups with comprehensive information regarding Open Educational Resources. Moreover, OERinfo will deliver the current state of art to practitioners, host information on best-practice examples, and reflect the diversity of existing initiatives.

A comprehensive knowledge base was thus constructed, offering edited thematic dossiers and systematically structured collections of information, with an enhanced scope, owing to integrated multimedia formats (e.g. podcasts, videos, didactically processed online modules) and communication platforms that are enriched by social media applications. Moreover, the project targeted the support of collaboration and networking among different OER actors and initiatives by offering suitable communication instruments, accompanying workshops and public relations work of the OER information centre.

In the second phase of the project (since November 2018), the focus of the further development and differentiation of the web platform was mainly on practical or application-oriented issues in the context of didactic-teaching use of freely licensed (digital) educational media. The active implementation of the OER paradigm in education and training should be further supported by workshops, training courses, and digital tools.

Digi-EBF

The framework program empirical education research of the BMBF contributes with its research focus on „Digitalization in Education” in the field of „Creating and Using Technological Developments in Education” to the “Education Offensive for the Digital Knowledge Society”. The meta project is coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) which accompanies the projects of the research area.

It presents the results of the projects in an overall scientific and social framework, analyzes the developments in the research area in a scientific manner, identifies research gaps, and promotes the networking of researches with each other as well as the exchange with educational practice. For successfully handling these divers and extensive tasks the University of Duisburg-Essen works closely together with DIPF, DIE, and IWM. The meta project thus contributes to the further development of the research field and promotes the quality of the research area “Digitalization in the Field of Education”. The work done within the meta project strengthens the relevance of the research project for the educational practice, promotes collaboration between science and practice, and transmits central research results for the public.

Eduserver

The German Education Server (Eduserver) is a guide to educational information on the web and offers basic and high-quality information and internet resources to all interested parties – fast, up-to-date, comprehensively and free of charge. In its function as a meta-server, the Eduserver mainly refers to internet resources provided by the federal government (Bund) and the federal states (Länder) of Germany, the European Union, higher education institutions, schools, state institutes, non-university research institutes, science organisations, libraries, documentation centres or museums, structuring the information and presenting it in scholarly contexts. The Eduserver also supports the collaboration between the education servers of all federal states in Germany. It additionally offers the platform Education Worldwide and a guide to educational research in Germany.

KANSAS

This research and development project aimed at developing, testing and evaluating the web-based search engine KANSAS. KANSAS will support teachers in adult literacy and German as a second language in preparing classes. Using the search engine, teachers will be enabled to determine both the topic and the linguistic complexity of texts to be searched on the internet and in electronic corpora. Taking into account the learners interests as well as their individual level of reading competence, KANSAS allows teachers to perfectly adjust the query to the needs of their course participants. Moreover, teachers can upload self-developed texts in order to analyze the language complexity. In addition to that, a simplified version of KANSAS will be developed, enabling advanced learners to search for texts with an appropriate level of language complexity on their own.

The interdisciplinary project KANSAS was conducted by the three collaboration partners under direction of the German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning. The German Institute of Adult Education (DIE) carried out several usability and quasi-experimental studies to evaluate the efficacy of the search engine. The MI examined the didactic suitability of the texts searched by KANSAS. Computational linguists of the University of Tübingen technically implemented the search engine and adapted it to the users’ needs. In close collaboration of all partners involved, several developmental versions of the search engine were released during the project term in order to test and optimize KANSAS.

University of Luxembourg

At the associated partner “University of Luxembourg” is the research group „Educational Processes in Contemporary Societies“ consisting of members from two Institutes devoted to educational research. It connects social scientific perspectives on education and learning processes (educational theory, philosophy, history, and sociology). The main focus is on educational policies, systems, and processes within particular cultural, political, and socio-economic contexts. Thus, particular importance is placed on historical, cross-national, and international perspectives. Objects of study, whether in quantitative or qualitative or historical and institutional analyses, are education policies, system development, learning processes and teaching, and learning within and outside educational organizations.

Activities:

The activities of the research group include editing journals and book series, contributing to national education reports (Germany, Luxembourg), organizing international conferences, evaluation and consulting in a range of countries and advisory board membership.