Learning Sciences and Online Learning Symposium

Online learning is becoming central to educational transformation efforts at institutions around the world. The increasing interest and engagement in digital and online learning suggest an urgency to examine the intersection of learning sciences/education research with digital learning practice.

Strategic Education Initiatives in the MIT Office of Digital Learning is hosting a national symposium in May 2015 to examine this intersection. We have invited a select group of practitioners and educational researchers to share their perspectives and to collectively address the synergistic opportunities in this intersection, with a view to designing better learning experiences and to inform the agenda for future educational research.

We expect that the outcomes of this symposium will not only inform digital/online learning activities at our institutions but influence development policy, practice and scholarship in an area that is becoming central to the discourse on educational change.

In particular, the symposium will focus on how online learning might help meet the persistent challenges that discipline-based educational researchers have identified in teaching within their disciplines.

The symposium will examine three themes:

• Threshold and difficult to learn concepts, as well as common misconceptions, that online and digital environments can address
• Unique and different opportunities that are afforded in online and digital environments
• Community and community interaction in online and digital learning experiences