The SEER Research Network for Digital Learning Platforms

The Network Lead will help platform developers, researchers, and educators share ideas, build knowledge, and strengthen dissemination. SEERNet will (a) maximize the distinctive advantages of organizing research around Digital Learning Platforms, (b) align to IES's goals by focusing activities around the Standards for Excellence in Educational Research ("SEER"), and (c) achieve deeper and broader national impacts by leveraging extensive, existing networks of education partners, researchers, and other educational stakeholders. Compared to typical field-generated education research grants, research conducted on a digital learning platform can be more agile, efficient, replicable, and cumulative and can better connect research to practice. The Network Lead will shape the work of the network to emphasize meaningful outcomes in the eyes of district leaders, educational policymakers, and other key stakeholders, in addition to being meaningful to the platform developers and to research teams. The Network Lead will organize the network to address all eight SEER Principles, thereby emphasizing generalizability and scaling across varied contexts and settings, enabling cost analysis, and also making findings, methods, and data open and widely available. They will organize platform developers and researchers to tackle challenges around ensuring availability of data needed to ask and answer research questions about equitable learning. Significance will be enhanced by intentionally leveraging Digital Promise's existing networks of school districts (such as the League of Innovative Schools) and their network of learning technology researchers (i.e., the Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences). Network Lead partner, Empirical Education, will likewise expand connections to important industry associations of educational technology companies. Further, to intentionally broaden participation of diverse scholars, the Network Lead will invite, include, and support emerging scholars who reflect the greater diversity sought in learning technology and educational research.