Learning Engineering ⚒️ ⚙️
What is it, and how can Litmus help schools implement it?
Learning engineering is a concept of instructional pedagogy that speaks to a planful cycle of data collection and analysis to continually improve learning outcomes over time. It brings together the deep insights of academic research and the real-world implementation of instructional practice, two educational realms that are often conducted in separate silos. To find out more about learning engineering as a concept, check out Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, or The Learning Agency.
So, how can using Litmus’s blended learning platform help teachers bring the best practices of learning engineering into their classrooms?
🔺 Because Litmus Learn has a variety of over a dozen distinct tools to both engage and assess students in deep learning, it’s an inherently multimodal data collection tool. Students can demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways, and they can interact with content in an equally diverse set of activities.
🔹 Our most transformative assessment tool is our Confidence Assessment, a feature teachers can activate in native quiz activities to collect data on how students respond to items, but also on how confident they are in their answer. In this way, teachers gain deep insight into student thinking about the material – whether they are correct, but with hesitation, or if they are confidently wrong.
This kind of data is an unmeasured element of learning that we believe is an important criterion that teachers can use to directly improve their instructional practice. Because Litmus collects this information as a part of any quiz automatically, it can be deeply impactful without increasing the burden on teacher time. The results are displayed in an intuitive interface using color gradations in a way to allow for analysis at a glance – either by individual students, by quiz item, or by a whole class.
🔺 Litmus helps bridge the gap between school and home by giving families a direct connection to the learning goals and activities teachers are assigning. Through features like interactive video, playable content-based games, and scientific simulations, and digital flashcards, students can work on learning at home, while parents can be sure that Litmus is a safe, guided, and purposeful forum for learning.
🔹 Another transformative feature to guide learning engineering is the Social Document – a collaborative tool based on Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ theory of students supporting one another’s learning through social interactions and collective problem-solving. Like the Confidence Assessment, the Social Document is a form of stealth assessment – that is that students aren’t innately aware that they are being assessed. This can improve the quality and variety of data teachers have at their disposal in implementing a Learning Engineering approach.
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