Overview

The Learning Engineering and Practice (LEAP) Group supports the development of the STEM workforce by creating new approaches that connect learning and careers across all levels of the workforce, by performing research to design and understand novel learning experiences, and by pioneering technologies that scale experiences to meet a broad range of learners. We create and deploys new approaches to learning for education and workforce development, with a focus on manufacturing, spanning from the individual to regional workforce systems. Our work is situated at the intersection of engineering pedagogy, learning sciences, extended reality (XR), human-computer interaction (HCI), digital learning, and industry competency assessment.

At present, our work encompasses the following three interrelated themes.

1. Learning technologies. We develop XR and haptics technologies to facilitate higher-order cognitive and psychomotor skills. We are specifically interested in open-ended, hands-on, and interactive environments.
2. STEM workforce and education. We study how to prepare a future workforce for the new types of STEM careers that the implementation of advanced technologies enables. We benchmark programs, examine operational and wage gaps, and develop participatory instructional design frameworks and tools to close the gap between future competencies and incumbent workers.
3. Digital learning and MOOCs. We investigate how to integrate social practices and authentic assessment into massive open online courses (MOOCs). We design novel environments for thousands of online learners, which we use to study new types of active and social remote learning.