The Canvas+Terracotta LMS-Based Experimental Education Research Platform

In partnership with Instructure (the company that makes Canvas), the team will develop Terracotta, a plug-in to Canvas that enables a teacher or researcher to collect informed consent, assign different versions of online learning activities randomly to students, and export deidentified study data. Terracotta stands for Tool for Educational Research with RAndomized COnTrolled TriAls and is designed to lower the technical and methodological barriers to conducting more rigorous and responsible experimental education research within the very environment where most learning and design currently take place: the LMS. With this work, the team will advance a Canvas+Terracotta platform for experimental education research, conducting development, assessment, and outreach in coordination with the Digital Learning Platform Network Lead.

The team's resulting products will benefit both education research and instructional practice broadly, with an open-source research platform and a large audience of users. The education research community will benefit from the ability to conduct rigorous and responsible experimental research easily in Canvas, the most popular learning management system in the US, and the environment where student learning increasingly takes place. This ease will allow researchers to conduct studies at larger scales, with parallel multisite class replications. Additionally, teachers will benefit from the opportunity to be more actively involved in the implementation of education research, which will produce findings that are more relevant for instructional practice, and for improving classroom learning. These efforts will support the Digital Learning Platform Network's goal of national leadership in transformative education research.