LTG Research Vision

Introduction

LTG Research Vision:

To carry out and disseminate influential research into the latest developments in the use of IT in traditional university teaching and learning, which is valued by the academic community inside and outside the University of Oxford.

The LTG undertakes research and development projects which:

• Meet and further the strategic goals of OUCS.
• Enable the further development of our services offered to University of Oxford.
• Link with learning and teaching at Oxford.
• Provide useful and relevant outputs to inform our contribution to academic programmes.
• Contribute to open-source, development and research communities of which we are members.
• Enable blue skies or horizon scanning work to be done in a cost effective manner as a funded project.
• Deliver improved business performance through innovation and new collaborations between the University and industry.
• Build upon our existing research strengths and profile.

We resource these projects by:

• Responding to relevant funding calls from research council and funding bodies and securing University funding for development.
• Developing research partnerships with academic colleagues and groups.
• Proactively building partnerships with other public sector organisations and universities.
• Making connections with industry via the knowledge transfer networks.

Research projects are facilitated by the OUCS Research Coordinator and managed by LTG.

Past and current research

The LTG has been awarded funding to investigate the following broad topics over the last five years:

• Current research into teaching and learning, directed towards promoting innovation in the use of digital technologies.
• Production, clustering and use of open educational resources (OER).
• Support for crowd-sourcing and community collection projects.
• Uses of agent based modelling in learning and teaching.
• Open approaches to development of online materials.
• Policy and practice for sustainable learning technology.
• Online tools and approaches for learning design.
• Technology that allows learners to share and express their understanding using social networking tools, and more advanced shared graphical simulation technologies.
• How open interoperability standards can be used to integrate the University Virtual Learning Environment and library services.
• Ways to provide online access to a range of authoritative digitised e-resources previously difficult or impossible to access.
• Institutional infrastructures that support university wide educational podcasting.
• Tools and techniques to allow the University move to a low-carbon computing environment.

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