WHY augMENTOR?
The development of personalized and collaborative learning and the achievement of higher-order thinking skills – the so-called 21st century competencies – is still nowadays a significant challenge. At the same time, it is of great interest to understand how learners work (with an emphasis on the process and not only on the outcomes), how educators orchestrate their classrooms, and what information they have access to in order to adapt/enhance/improve their orchestration.
Emerging technologies have the potential to propel the change from an instructional teaching paradigm, that favors mass instruction, to a learner-centered paradigm, that promotes the development of new roles for both the teacher and the learner.
However, their acceptability and adoption are still slow mainly due to fragmented approaches. Importantly, in order to ensure quality education it is mandatory to address unexpected emergencies and disruptive events that may undermine the human and social dimensions of learning, and this is something that emerging technologies will not be able to achieve on its own.
As such, it is of crucial importance to leverage these technologies with a community-oriented, connected and human mindset.
WHAT IS augMENTOR VISION AND APPROACH?
customized and collaborative learning
augMENTOR adopts an augmented intelligence approach, where people and machines work together, building on their own strengths, to develop customized and collaborative learning paths that promote both basic and 21st century competencies, such as communication, collaboration, digital literacy, critical as well as design thinking and creativity. augMENTOR will leverage advancements in the fields of Pedagogical Design, Creative Pedagogy, Explainable Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for instructional purposes.
artificial intelligence-boosted toolkit
Through an artificial intelligence-boosted toolkit, that builds on big data and learning analytics, augMENTOR will provide different types of stakeholders with explainable recommendations for smart search and identification of educational resources, as well as for designing personalized learning profiles that take into account individual actors’ characteristics, needs, and preferences.
This type of data could be available to students, enabling them to manage their learning. At the same time, teachers can also monitor students’ cognitive progress, plan their teaching effectively and train pre-service and in-service teachers to develop critical perspectives on emerging technologies.
provide guidelines to support informed decision MAKING
Ultimately, augMENTOR will provide guidelines to all types of stakeholders involved to support informed decision/policy making in diverse education and training issues, such as addressing potential underlying educational difficulties and disabilities, shaping individual learning paths, and identifying cases of gifted and talented students, so as to enable them to reach their full potential.