What is the future of research and development in lifelong learning?
In a world in which the internet makes information widely available, in which digital tools can allow children and adults everywhere to participate in high-level scientific research and knowledge creation, and in which technological change means that people will have to re-skill train multiple times in a lifetime, what kind of research on learning do we need to build a ‘Learning Planet’?
This was the question being discussed by Roland Tormey, coordinator of the Teaching Support Centre (CAPE) at EPFL, yesterday at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, as part of an international group of speakers invited to respond to a report on the future of R&D in Lifelong Learning commissioned by the French Ministers for Education and Higher Education and written by François Taddei, UNESCO Chair of Learning Sciences at Universié Sorbonne Paris Cité .
“Imposing ‘innovation’ from the outside has not worked in education, so our approach needs to be participant-led; it is teachers and learners who need to name what their challenges are. We then need to be able to bring findings from learning sciences to help teachers and learners to identify innovative solutions to those challenges, and then we need to help them to research to evaluate how the innovation has worked”, Roland Tormey told the audience which included French Minister for Higher Education and Research, Thierry Mandon. “Doing this requires particular types of resources – we need to have knowledge in learning science and skills in educational research. The challenge therefore is how we can use digital tools to begin scaling up this process, so that this kind of process becomes available to all”.