TELS at The Concord Consortium

In the fall of 2003, the Concord Consortium co-founded the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) Center, a Teaching and Learning Center funded by the National Science Foundation . TELS supports applied research on the educational impacts on science of information and computer technologies.

TELS is a collaboration between the Concord Consortium, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and multiple colleges, universities, and school districts. TELS has generated over 100 technical papers, trained 40 fellows and nine post-doctoral scholars, and studied materials used by over 13,000 students.

The inspiration for TELS was to study the affordances of merging the server-based system for creating and deploying computer-based science curricula developed at Berkeley called WISE with the client-based probes and models developed at the Concord Consortium. The result has been the development of SAIL, the Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning. SAIL has been used to create a new authoring and implementation platform called WISE 3 that can deploy client-based activities that are constructed from interoperable modules.

Current TELS research focuses in three major areas:

• Teacher Feedback. LOOPS is a project that uses SAIL technology to provide effective real-time feedback to teachers that they can use to modify their instruction based on what students are learning.
• Learning Progressions. CLEAR is a project that uses SAIL technology to study learning as students progress through three grades, with a focus on energy topics throughout grades 6-8.
• Applications of SAIL technology. SAIL is being applied to empower most ongoing research at the Concord Consortium. Although the user interface is different, SAIL is at the core of our Universal Design for Learning project and is in the process of enhancing the Molecular Workbench .