With a team of researchers from Educational Science, Digital Technologies and Psychology, we are seeking new ways to support evidence-based educational innovation in schools, universities and workplaces. We suggest a new way of doing educational research which is rooted both in theory and practice, and uses technology to enable the systematic use of data by different stakeholders (not only researchers, but also teachers, students or policy-makers).
Living Labs: Co-Creating Educational Innovation with Schools
We seek to establish Living Labs for Educational Innovation in Estonia. By involving all stakeholders in a co-creation process, we aim to change practices in education in a sustainable way, and to establish evidence for their effectiveness. We develop and promote this method via partnership projects with schools and science centers, whereby teachers actively participate in the development of new teaching and learning methods.
Smart classroom and Learning Analytics
Our ‘smart classroom’ concept is based on the collection and processing of multiple sources of data from real world learning situations. By using various new technology and tools, researchers can collect information about different aspects of classroom phenomena, like a teacher’s movement during a class, learners’ collaborative group dynamics, room temperature, noise levels, etc. All these data will then be used by the actors generating the data during their learning and teaching processes, and contribute to creating an evidence-base for researching different learning scenarios and environments.
Inquiry and Collaborative Learning in and outside the Classroom
We study and support new forms of STEM education. We take education outside the classroom using smartphone apps (like Avastusrada and SmartZoos) to understand how technology can augment “learning on the move”. We also study the cognitive basis for students’ critical reasoning and creative problem solving, as they learn in these and other open learning settings.
Building Research Excellence
Our mission is to build up the Center of Excellence in Educational Innovation (CEEI) to strengthen research capacity at Tallinn University more widely. Our work is primarily funded by the CEITER project – European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No. 669074.