Wat will be the role of educators in the future if AI can give every answer and complete assignments? And what does that mean for learners?
Professor Marcus Specht, outgoing director of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning looks back at 10 years of working together in educational innovation.
The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning started as a network for training and knowledge exchange and, under Specht's leadership together with an international group of researchers from Leiden University, TU Delft and Erasmus University Rotterdam, grew in recent years into a research centre focused on digitalisation and virtualisation of education and digital skills.
How important was the multidisciplinary context of Leiden-Delft-Erasmus here?
Specht: ‘The digital transformation of education, of course, holds a technical issue: what can a particular new technology do, and how to design it? But it is precisely the collaboration of different disciplines, engineering as well as alpha, beta and gamma sciences, that is important when investigating what works, why and how. For the Centre for Education and Learning, it was therefore really of great value to operate in this context'.
PhD students crossing borders
Collaboration was also important for the many PhD students who found a place at the centre. Specht: 'For example, an educational psychology researcher working on goal setting with AI collaborated with computer scientists from Delft to build variations of a chatbot to study.'
'Another example of a crossing borders: a PhD student on programming skills from the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science collaborated with computer scientists and a Human Computer Interaction researcher in the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Delft.'
'Or a study on reading comprehension combining insights from educational psychology research at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam with the perspectives from Industrial Design in Delft.'
The results of the Centre for Education and Learning's research have been compiled in the publication 'Research for Digital Education'.