The organization: Dr. Ryan Baker and Dr. Jaclyn Ocumpaugh at the Penn Center for Learning Analytics saw how quickly digital learning platforms expanded during the pandemic, but also how the quality in these online learning experiences and edtech tools drastically differed. They also believed that the need for motivating, engaging, and culturally-responsive edtech could be addressed via the cross-disciplinary research supported by Convergence Accelerator, an annual National Science Foundation (NSF) opportunity. The Convergence Accelerator program identifies and supports convergent research that will deliver multidisciplinary, high-impact solutions to meet societal needs. The program funds workshops to explore ideas and demonstrate how convergent research could create a positive impact in those topic areas. These workshops then have the ability to bring together experts across disciplines in collaborative, community-building conferences that then result in a publicly available white paper contributing knowledge to the field.
The need: By proposing a Convergence Accelerator workshop titled “Transforming Educational Technology Through Convergence,” Dr. Baker and Dr. Ocumpaugh aimed to bring together experts from assessment, middle school math, and data science education with the ultimate goal of improving edtech via combined, interdisciplinary knowledge.
Our role: In order to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration, our partners knew they would need to create enriching opportunities that fostered connections among the workshop participants. The Learning Agency collaborated in the planning of the “Transforming Educational Technology Through Convergence” workshop series, supporting partner goals as we brought together 35+ participants from edtech, research, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector. To build community, we collaborated to create opportunities for deep engagement and relationship building. Our successes include:
- Supporting the recruitment of a diverse group of participants. Our team worked to identify key stakeholders in the fields of assessment, middle school math, and data science education that had diverse experiences and backgrounds. We worked to generate outreach lists and confirm participation so that we could ultimately bring these experts to the table, allowing them to address the problems and potential in edtech in a novel, collaborative way. This resulted in 35+ participants from different fields who were eager to engage with the “Transforming Educational Technology Through Convergence” community.
- Collaborating to organize engaging workshops. The Learning Agency team used our event planning and execution experience to organize virtual conferences that would foster knowledge sharing and community building among participants. We collaborated with our partners to identify workshop goals and then ensured the workshops themselves were smoothly executed.
- Fostering networking and small group opportunities. We knew that creating opportunities for deeper conversation and community building would be a fundamental part of this project. We strived to give participants the opportunity to meet and work with professionals outside of their expertise, including synchronous networking sessions during conferences and additional small group opportunities. Our team organized the small groups to have participants representing different sectors, approaches, and backgrounds. We helped facilitate these small group sessions by providing guiding questions and materials so participants could get the most out of their conversations.
- Spotlighting community knowledge in a final report. To ensure that the knowledge generated by the “Transforming Educational Technology Through Convergence” participants was recorded and publicly available, our team combined findings from the small groups so that they could ultimately be shared and elaborated upon by Dr. Baker and Dr. Ocumpaugh in a final conference report. This allows the positive impact of the “Transforming Educational Technology Through Convergence” community to continue in this accessible format.