CIRCL Primers are brief summaries of key topics in the field of cyberlearning. They are used to build capacity in the field and to give people a sense of cyberlearning’s main themes. Primers are developed by small teams of volunteers and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In addition to original primers, CIRCL occasionally features relevant primers found in the literature.
Practicing Connections: A Framework to Guide Instructional Design for Developing Understanding in Complex Domains
Research suggests that expert understanding is characterized by coherent mental representations featuring a high level ...
A Review of Fundamentals and Influential Factors of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a trend that is currently leading to controversial discussions ...
Algorithmic Fairness in Education
Data-driven predictive models are increasingly used in education to support students, instructors, and administrators. However, ...
Mining Big Data in Education: Affordances and Challenges
The emergence of big data in educational contexts has led to new data-driven approaches to ...
What is AI Literacy? Competencies and Design Considerations
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly integrated in user-facing technology, but public understanding of these ...
Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing
Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, yielding state-of-the-art ...
Situated Cognition
In this brief introductory chapter, we present a bird’s-eye view of the conceptual landscape of ...
Neuroscience and Education
Cyberlearning researchers and neuroscientists are beginning to explore new methods to understand connections between classroom ...
Assessing Computational Thinking
One of the primary challenges of computational thinking as an integrative, cross disciplinary competency is ...
Virtual Reality in Educational Settings
From a learning science perspective, VR ties into long-standing themes around how dynamic representations and ...
Broadening Youth Participation in Computer Science & Engineering
The most successful programs that have an impact on underrepresented groups are those that have ...
Computational Thinking
Computational thinking (CT), a term that experienced a surge of popularity in the 2000s, refers ...
Speech Technologies and Learning
The classroom learning environment is filled with speech in all forms—classroom discourse has notably been ...
Data Science Education
Data Science is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to derive insights and knowledge from the ...
Persistence in Education
Perseverance has become part of the everyday language of education. The misconception that intellectual power ...
Citizen Science
Citizen science is the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research or scientific ...
Remote Labs
Labs are widely considered to be essential to learning science and engineering. Remote labs can ...
Looking Ahead: Trends that Will Shape Cyberlearning
This primer organizes two dozen current trends that we feel are most relevant into five ...
Smart and Connected Communities for Learning
Smart and connected communities for learning (SCCL) leverage networks and technology to foster lifelong, lifewide ...
Evidence-Centered Design
Evidence-centered design, or ECD for short, takes the art of test design and turns it ...
Understanding Universal Design for Learning
UDL is a research-based framework intended to guide the design of learning technologies that are ...
The Cutting Edge of Informal Learning: Makers, Mobile, and More!
Cyberlearning spans in-school and out-of-school learning -- and these days, a lot of meaningful learning ...
Games and Virtual Worlds
Computer-based games and virtual worlds provide opportunities for players to think about choices, take action, ...
Partnering for Impact: Increasing Cyberlearning’s Influence in Education Markets
Many Cyberlearning researchers know that their work could make a significant positive impact on today’s ...
Technology Enabled Formative Assessment
Formative assessment occurs when teachers check student understanding and guide decision making to improve learning ...
Collaborative Learning
Learning to explain, justify, critique, etc. are essential skills for today’s citizens, for scientists, and ...
Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics
EDM is the use of multiple analytical techniques to better understand relationships, structure, patterns, and ...
AI Applications in Education
AI techniques can enable educational technologies to better track, adapt to, and support individual learners ...
Learning Sciences
The Learning Sciences is a field of scientific research that developed in the 1980s, from ...
Collective Inquiry and Knowledge Building
Technology can enhance how students learn when they work with all the students in their ...
Design-Based Implementation Research
DBIR was developed by education researchers in response to evidence that research-based innovations are often ...
**A CIRCL primer is overview of what has been learned on a big idea topic, not a comprehensive literature review. The intended audience includes proposal writers, educators, developers, and journalists with popular press.
- For a proposal writer unfamiliar with a particular topic, a primer should provide awareness of relevant prior research and important challenges.
- For a developer, a primer should help them decide if this is a knowledge base that could potentially help them with their product.
- For a journalist or policy maker, primers give a sense of what prior research has accomplished.
Primers are developed by small teams of volunteers from the cyberlearning community, reviewed by CIRCL staff and other experts in the area, revised as needed, and then published on the CIRCL web site under a Creative Commons license.
To learn more about primers and our process, see So You Want to Write a Primer?