New Grants Support Chris Dede's Research

Using this project & in my science class is different from my regular classes because we had to be the scientists and figure out what was making the people sick. -- Thus a middle school student describes how the River City MUVE Project takes learning out of normal classroom spheres into an online environment where students work in teams and take on the identity of scientists. In River City, students step back into the 19th century to help the community solve public health problems, using many levels of skills. This curriculum is exploring the strengths and limits for learning of an emerging technology: multi-user virtual environments. For several years, Chris Dede (Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies and a senior member of the TIE faculty) and his team of student researchers have designed, implemented, and studied this NSF-funded curriculum in a variety of school systems. Now with a new 3-year grant, they are scaling up to reach hundreds of teachers and tens of thousands of students a year. They are studying how to make the curriculum robust enough to be effective across four key variables: class size, students' prior academic history, differences in teachers' training, and level of engagement of students in science.

Learn more about MUVE at their website.
Read an article and an interview with Chris Dede about MUVE.

Another project Chris Dede is involved in, a grant from the US Department of Education, will assess Augmented Reality Simulation Games (ARSG) that use mobile computers to teach students mathematics and literacy skills. In ARSG such as Environmental Detectives and Mad City Murder, students confront complex multi-dimensional problems that demand higher order thinking skills in confronting ecological/environmental/public health and other local issues. With this grant, Dede and researchers from UW and MIT will teach teachers how to create ARSG for their students. Their goal is to make this practical and sustainable for a wide range of teachers and schools by creating better authoring tools, developing teacher workshops, and fostering an online community of teacher/developers. Rigorous research will evaluate improvements in student learning using standardized tests.

Find more information at the Handheld Augmented Reality Project website. Watch a video of a seminar on research about wireless handheld devices that sets a context for this grant.

Chris Dede also organized a recent conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Evolving a Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development (oTPD). Stimulated by the proliferation and variability in oTPD programs, and the desire to make oTPD initiatives less daunting and more effective, Chris and his students are producing a conference volume and a research agenda based on the discussions of conference presenters and attendees.

Visit the conference site. Read an article about this conference. Read about the recently released book inspired by this conference, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods, edited by Chris Dede.