By working together, the network and DLPs aspire to provide a set of models for research infrastructure. The desired models would show how well-designed infrastructure can enable educational research. By specifying “models” and not a singular “model,” we acknowledge that each DLP is pursuing different paths to designing its infrastructure and that complete convergence is not within the networks’ current scope or desires. Further, SEERNet sees that there are many platforms beyond these five DLPs that could consider themselves as providing infrastructure to research, and believes that, based on the variety of DLPs in this network, SEERNet can provide a range of examples to others to guide their development of parallel research infrastructure.
Individually and collectively, the participants want to contribute to new and better ways of doing research in the future. During the convening, participants articulated four kinds of advances in educational research that they would like to see emerging from efforts by the SEERNet participants, as listed below:
Better science: how infrastructure can enable research with greater openness, external validity, utility, replicability, and other desired properties.
Better engineering: how infrastructure can be engineered to enhance privacy, enable greater uptake of research results into products, and support learning engineers to utilize emerging findings in broader applications, etc.
Better contributions to practice: how infrastructure can lead to research that better involves practitioners and more directly and productively informs their everyday teaching and learning
Better community: how infrastructure can support communities of researchers, practitioners and developers that are more inclusive and work better together.
This project is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N210034 to Digital Promise. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.