e-Learning Research Group

The e-Learning Research group is concerned with a wide range of issues concerning teaching and learning in the digital age. It focuses on the role of new technologies in developing and revolutionising educational theory and practice in a variety of educational contexts in the 21st century.

Members of the group are drawn from academic staff, researcher officers and research students in the Department of Education, and the group also works closely with colleagues in the Oxford Internet Institute, the Learning Technologies Group of the university computing services (OUCS) and TALL (Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning group of the Department for Continuing Education).

The group is run jointly by Dr Chris Davies and Dr Rebecca Eynon.

The group is also closely involved in running the MSc in e-Learning at this department, which focuses strongly on the development of new researchers in this field.

Past Projects

The group grew out of the Oxford-Intel Research Project (1998–2003) which played a major role in the development of Immersive Education’s kar2ouche educational software, which received the British Computer Society 2002 Award for Educational IT. Subsequently the group led the UK development of Intel’s Teach to the Future programme, which provided nationwide ICT training for teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Other funded projects include: the Oxfordshire Schools Broadband Project, carried out in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and Becta; Using Digital Technologies to Create Learning Communities for ITE; the  Supplementary Schools Website Project funded by CfBT; and a literature review of 14-19 education and technology for Futurelab.

Current Research Activities

The Learner in their Context Research Project

This project, which is part of its Becta’s major programme of research in support of the Government’s Harnessing Technology strategy, looks at the learning opportunities afforded by young people’s uses of new technologies in their everyday lives.

The project has just been awarded the contract for the second of three years. The research team is led by Chris Davies, and includes Rebecca Eynon (also a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute), John Furlong, Jenny Good, Lars Malmberg and Melissa Highton, Head of the Learning Technologies Group of the University Computing Services.

Ongoing research reports will be made available on the Becta website. The current report can be linked to here.

The Learning Companion: an embodied conversational agent for learning

Chris Davies, Rebecca Eynon, Yorick Wilks

This project aims to evaluate the feasibility of a computer-based digital tool - the Learning Companion (LC) - intended to help adults whose engagement with learning is tentative or hard to sustain make productive use of the Internet for identifying, planning and achieving their own projects of learning. The LC is a computer-based conversational agent - in effect an animated speaking character on a computer screen - that stays with the user  over a period of time and gets to 'know' the learner. The cutting-edge technology on which the LC will be based has been developed as part of the Companions Project. This research is a joint project between the Department of Education and the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. It is supported by the John Fell fund.

The educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain

John Coleman,  Chris Davies, Ingrid Lunt and Sonia Livingstone (LSE)

This ESRC seminar series is being run jointly by the Department of Education and LSE. Participation is by invitation but please get in touch with the organisers if you wish to attend. by writing to seminarseries@education.ox.ac.uk

The series brings together leading researcher, developers and practitioners from across the UK. The first seminar took place in Oxford on March 12, and featured papers from Sonia Livingstone, John Coleman, Charles Crook and Neil Selwyn. It focused on the theoretical frameworks for the social shaping and social consequences of new technologies for children and young people.