Learning + Technology Group, LeTech
Motto
A research perspective of learning and teaching allows us to improve education through better educational technologies and teaching methods.
Aims
To support students' learning, making it more motivating, engaging, collaborative, reflective, rewarding and fruitful. To support teaching, making it more efficient and effective.
To solve practical problems caused by large classes and limited resources such as the lack of prompt, personalized feedback and assessment.
To help people learn about abstract concepts such as those featured in computer programming and to help them cope with the complexity of software systems.
Means
We innovate and create technological solutions to problems in education, with an emphasis on computing education. We provide students and teachers with new technologies, methods and materials. We not only create such innovations but evaluate them in scientifically sound ways.
We make use of and develop advanced software visualization techniques, exploring their uses in education and beyond.
We use scientific methods to gain insights into students' perspectives and understandings of the content of learning as well as their motivations, attitudes and preferences. Understanding learning helps us become better teachers and better tool-builders.
We mix innovations, theories, methods, and people from multiple disciplines, including Computer Science, Education and Cognitive Science. We have a long-standing collaboration with the Department of Education at University of Helsinki, and frequently collaborate with foreign colleagues in Computing Education
Research
Much of our work is based on constant communication between education in practice and educational research. Actual learning and teaching that takes place at our university serves as data for our research, which in turn creates innovations that can be put into practice locally as well as globally. This two-way relationship is reflected in the high pedagogical competence of our researchers.
Active collaboration
We are very active in supporting the use of educational tools across other institutions in Finland as well as internationally. We have active collaboration with many scientists and research groups within this field.