History of the CIRCLS Community
Download the Report (PDF)For more than a decade, the NSF has promoted the development of an interdisciplinary research community—bringing together learning scientists and computer scientists to explore how emerging technologies can be integrated into educational settings to enhance learning. In 2017, NSF changed the program structure so that, rather than funding a range of project types, the NSF EXPs only funded exploratory projects. Researchers in this community are allowed the creativity to come up with novel ideas, the flexibility to adapt or change course when necessary, and the courage to proudly share what they learned from failure as well as success.
The NSF EXPs encourage high-risk/high-reward exploratory research because NSF recognizes that pushing at the boundaries of what’s possible in STEM education, grounded in what we know about how people learn, leads to innovative learning designs that move the field forward. Funded projects bring together investigators and partners from diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, sometimes working in unconventional settings, often testing new approaches to learning, and usually employing cutting-edge technologies. NSF EXPs have ranged from investigating how to enable social learning with the use of virtual agents in augmented reality settings to employing AI to help high school engineering teachers assess students’ design work (see Portfolio Analysis).
NSF’s novel funding structure required new ways of providing guidance, resources and opportunities to the community. Since 2020, the Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences (CIRCLS) has provided that support. The center’s mission is to work with NSF EXP PIs, support the needs of the broader research community engaged in exploratory research on emerging technologies for learning, and amplify the resulting insights to broad audiences. Appreciating the unique qualities of this community, the CIRCLS resource center highlights the interdisciplinary, exploratory research that NSF EXP PIs engage in and provides researchers not yet funded through the program with community resources and opportunities. Examples include convenings, expertise exchanges, rapid community reports, and community reports.
Convenings
Every other year, CIRCLS hosts meetings, or convenings, for project PIs, project partners and others who do related work in emerging technologies for teaching and learning. CIRCLS has a long history of exploring diversity in learning, starting with the convening “Designing for Deeper, Broader, and More Equitable Learning,” and continuing with “Exploring Contradictions in Achieving Equitable Futures.” CIRCLS has continued these convenings with the themes “Remake Broadening” in 2021 and “Shaping AI and Emerging Technologies to Empower Learning Communities” in 2023. Throughout our work, diversity, equity, and inclusion have been powerful fundamental principles in learning and education to support the learning of more groups.
These convenings are designed to be highly interactive, connecting people from multiple disciplines and with varying kinds and levels of experience. CIRCLS invites speakers who often offer a critical perspective on the technologies the community studies, and structures discussion around the latest findings, the practical realities, and the ethical implications of interdisciplinary, exploratory research. CIRCLS has also invited doctoral students, Einstein Fellows, and classroom teachers to attend the convenings to encourage their understanding of cutting-edge learning technologies, tools, or innovative research projects. Convening participants are encouraged to co-create the community with their colleagues through working sessions. The CIRCLS’21 Convening Outcomes Report reflects the collaborative work we engaged in with the community at a virtual convening.
Expertise Exchanges
Another way the CIRCLS community is supported to engage in interdisciplinary, exploratory research is through Expertise Exchanges. These are virtual working groups that bring diverse professionals together in conversation about learning with innovative technologies. These groups have evolved over time, work together to produce collaborative dissemination products, and have established offshoot groups that focus on activities they identify as relevant. The Expertise Exchanges hosted by CIRCLS include:
- Educator CIRCLS: This group is composed of educators interested in sharing their experiences implementing innovative learning technologies or learning more about emerging technologies for teaching and learning to help bridge the gap between research and practice. This group has a blog, and members of the group have created an Emerging Technology Adoption Framework for preK-12 Education as well as a glossary of AI terms. Every summer, the group also creates webinars where they share more about the work and thinking of the community to broaden the number of educators thinking about the work.
- Emerging Scholars CIRCLS: This is a community that brings together graduate students, postdocs, and other early career scholars who do interdisciplinary computer science and learning sciences research or who are interested in doing this kind of research. This group held a series of mentoring sessions with established scholars in the field, held professional development sessions on topics such as how to make the most of conferences and how to write proposals, and created affinity groups around AI and education, research methods and theory, and educational technology.
- AI CIRCLS: This expertise exchange is open to anyone in the CIRCLS community who is interested in AI and how it intersects with various topics. For example, the group held a series around community partnerships and a project incubator series on literacy and AI, held a session on AI and Education Policy, and ran mock review panels to help broaden participation in NSF programs and offer professional development to the next generation of principal investigators. In addition, six emerging scholars were invited to collaborate with the Journal of Computing in Higher Education (JCHE) on a special issue on AI and education equity in higher education.
Rapid Community Reports
Rapid Community Reports were created to provide this exploratory research community the opportunity to share about ongoing work more quickly than is typical with standard academic publications. There are three types of RCRs researchers use to share ideas to build knowledge in the community: primers (introductions of key topics in learning science and technology), workshop outcomes (results from focused meetings on themes), and design reflections (critical analyses of emerging designs).
Community Reports
This current report on interdisciplinary, exploratory research is the fourth in a series that explores and reflects on the work of the community of researchers who investigate emerging technologies for teaching and learning. In 2017, the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) resource center published Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology, which presented a variety of projects that represented key genres or categories of research that characterized the field of emerging technologies for learning at that time, such as Community Mapping, Expressive Construction, and Virtual Peers and Coaches, as well as research methods such as Multimodal Analysis and Data Analytics for Assessment.
In 2020, the CIRCL team worked with a group of experts in the field to reflect on eight years of projects funded through NSF’s Cyberlearning programs. The report, titled Ambitious Mashups: Reflections on a Decade of Cyberlearning Research notes that many of these projects creatively integrate various ideas and topics, such as AI, collaboration, equity, or informal environments, in ways that push the frontiers of teaching and learning.
Last fall, in 2023, the CIRCLS team published Partnerships for Change: Transforming Research on Emergent Learning Technologies. The report shares the experiences of researchers working in partnership with teachers, administrators, informal educators, community organizations, neurodivergent youth, community college faculty, tribal nations, and institutional review boards to co-create mutually beneficial research experience with emerging technologies for teaching and learning.
A consistent storyline connects these reports. Following a first report that benchmarked the state of the field, a second report uncovered a key characteristic of the most exciting exploratory projects—that they combined and integrated multiple technologies to explore powerful new designs for learning. A third report revealed that partnerships are at the center of innovative exploratory design work, driving creative change. Now, this final report in the series looks retrospectively at the portfolio through the eyes of the PIs: What was truly new and different about how PIs in this portfolio conducted exploratory, interdisciplinary research?
