Methods and Outcomes of the NSF Project on Synthesizing Environments for Digitally-Mediated Team Learning

This poster paper describes the authors’ single-year National Science Foundation (NSF) project DRL-1825007 titled, “DCL: Synthesis and Design Workshop on Digitally-Mediated Team Learning” which has been conducted as one of nine awards within NSF-18-017: Principles for the Design of Digital STEM Learning Environments. Beginning in September 2018, the project conducted the activities herein to deliver a three-day workshop on Digitally-Mediated Team Learning (DMTL) to convene, invigorate, and task interdisciplinary science and engineering researchers, developers, and educators to coalesce the leading strategies for digital team learning. The deliverable of the workshop is a White Paper composed to identify one-year, three-year, and five-year research and practice roadmaps for highly-adaptable environments for computersupported collaborative learning within STEM curricula. As subject to the chronology of events, highlights of the White Paper’s outcomes will be showcased within the poster itself. Collaborations during this workshop identified near-term and future research directions to facilitate adaptable digital environments for highly-effective, rewarding, and scalable team-based learning. An emphasis of the workshop included the personalization of collaborations among diverse learners by automating the identification and utilization of learners’ efficacies and knowledge gaps to create complementary collaborative teams that maximize avenues for peer teaching and learning. The workshop targeted the utilization and efficacy of next-generation learning architectures through a focus on instructional technologies that facilitate digitallymediated team-based learning. These included technical objectives of: (1) identifying new research in learning analytics required to automate more optimal composition, formation, and adaptation of learner design teams; (2) detecting advances in physical and virtual learning environments that can achieve more effective and scalable observation and assessment of learner teams in real-time; (3) distinguishing data mining techniques to leverage devices such as monitors, trackers, and automated camera observations to increase efficacy of team learning; and (4) extending collaborative learning technologies to broaden participation and achievement of diverse learner groups, including women and other underrepresented and underserved populations in STEM. The poster will present the results of the workshop for the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of digitally-mediated teams.