This year, we launched our Teaching and Learning Innovation Lab to support research and development on teaching and learning across the Duke community with an emphasis on experimentation and translational learning research.

To support the scale-up of our educational R&D efforts, we have created a new leadership role on our team, Associate Director for Research, Evaluation, and Development. We promoted Learning Innovation’s Kim Manturuk to inaugurate the position and develop a strategy. Kim is joined by Grey Reavis our new R&D Project Coordinator.

WALTer (We Are Learning, Too)

In 2018, Learning Innovation expanded its educational R&D with the launch of a signature project, WALTer (“We Are Learning, Too” – a quote from our partner Prof. Bridgette Martin Hard). WALTer simplifies the process of doing learning science research at Duke through new technology, templates and processes. The project is a partnership of Learning Innovation, faculty researchers and the Institutional Review Board (IRB). WALTer helps faculty quickly gain consent from students to participate in research, accelerates IRB review through pre-approved language and makes it easier for faculty to do blinded research in courses. Our aim is to advance the science of learning while protecting student data privacy and control.

Last year, 12 Duke faculty participated in WALTer. Our goal in 2019 is to make WALTer a successful open source project adopted by many universities. In the coming months we will publish an open source toolbox and share the project more broadly with the higher education community. We are partnering with the Empirical Educator Project, a collaborative that promotes evidence-based teaching and learning, to help disseminate WALTer.