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Introduction
From Benchmarking-Tel
Introduction
STELLAR represents the effort of the leading institutions and projects in European TEL to unify our diverse TEL community. This Network of Excellence is motivated by the need for European research on Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) to build upon, synergize, and extend the valuable work we have started by significantly building capacity in TEL research within Europe, which is required to allow the European Union to achieve its goals via the Bologna Agreement and the execution of the Lisbon Agenda.
The European TEL agenda has been set for the last four years by the Kaleidoscope network – with a huge strength in pedagogy and scientific excellence, and the Prolearn network with a complimentary strength in technical and professional excellence. Both networks have been successful in integrating a large set of groups of researchers and other stakeholders, coming from a variety of informing disciplines and bringing along a wide range of concepts and methods. The downside of this inclusive multidisciplinarity and its broad success, however, is fragmentation. The tension between depth and breadth is not unique to TEL alone (see e.g. Caroll (2003) for HCI), but it undermines the opportunity for multidisciplinary research and endangers future development of the field.
Through their integration work, both previous EU networks of excellence have managed to partially reduce the fragmentation of the field – each in their own well-defined area of excellence. The integration of these two areas with each other and further extension beyond them, however, remains a challenge for this field. The disjoint scientific traditions contributing to TEL could combine to form a stronger integrated community, which would be recognized and connected with TEL stakeholders.
STELLAR wants to overcome this fragmentation and facilitate a real multi- and trans-disciplinary approach that TEL research needs. In addition, we perceive a TEL research landscape, which is becoming significantly risk averse, funding and producing work which is relatively safe and ‘low pay-off’. We see integrating the excellence achieved by the previous networks and moving on to the higher strategic formation of policy based in leading research including all relevant disciplines is the challenge for the next years. STELLAR will move beyond the earlier networks by setting a new and critical foresight agenda for TEL via an annually reviewed Grand Challenge programme.