Jaime Casap

Jaime Casap is the Chief Education Evangelist at Google. In this role, he evangelizes the power and potential of technology and the web as enabling and supporting tools in pursuit of promoting inquiry-driven learning models. Jaime collaborates with school systems, educational organizations, and leaders focused on building innovation and iteration into our education policies and practices. He speaks on education, technology, innovation, and generation z, at events around the world.

In addition to his role at Google, Jaime is also an author and serves on a number of boards for organizations focused on education, innovation, and equity. Jaime teaches a 10th-grade communication class at the Phoenix Coding Academy in Phoenix and is an adjunct professor at Arizona State University, where he teaches classes on policy, innovation, and leadership.

Casap is a returning Reimaginer, having offered a keynote at 2016’s event. You can follow and reach him on Twitter at @jcasap.

Sonia Ilie

Dr Sonia Ilie is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the Faculty of Education. She researches educational inequality, in access and in learning, with a particular focus on expanding fair access to higher education. Her research explores programmes that can be used to narrow the socio-economic attainment gap in education; and the metrics and indicators which may be used to measure disadvantage in this context. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar, and is currently a Fellow of Hughes Hall.

Dr Ilie will introduce the Reimagine Education community to the work done by the LEGACY project to measure learning gain in higher education, playing a crucial role in driving the conference’s central focus on measuring, prioritising, and enhancing the efficacy of learning approaches and solutions.

Also driving this focus on evaluation and assessment of learning gain will be Jenny Bergeron, Director of Educational Research and Evaluation and Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning; and Carla Aerts, former Deputy Director at the EDUCATE project, a University College London initiative to ensuring that ed tech products prioritise, and improve, the evaluation of their solution’s efficacy. For more information about Dr. Ilie’s work with the LEGACY project, read on…

Legacy Project

LEGACY is a research project funded by the English Government that brings together leading researchers and practitioners actively focused on piloting and testing alternative measurements methods for capturing learning gain in the English higher education system. The aim of the Cambridge strand of LEGACY is to develop a conceptual framework to underscore the measurement of subject-adjacent learning gains across a range of disciplines in higher education. The development of the framework has been framed by broad understandings of the espoused aims and purposes of higher education. Within that, the framework draws on established theories of learning in higher education; student approaches to learning; and models of self-regulated learning. International evidence from Australia (on graduate attributes), from the US (where learning gain originates), and the wider European context (e.g. on learning outcomes from higher education), was also considered, in addition to research on core skills from roughly two decades ago in the UK. This complemented primary qualitative research with a range of student participants, which informed the co-constructed definition and multi-dimensional framework for learning gain across disciplines.

The conceptual framework allowed, alongside students’ own perspective, for the development of a new measurement instrument that accounted for the practical limitations of at-scale implementation, particularly in relation to the length and pitch of the instrument, to the need for both test-like measures and self-report scales. Twelve separate measurement scales, some emerging from existing, validated measures, other purpose-built for LEGACY were included in the measurement instrument. Just under 50,000 students in 11 universities were invited to take part in the three-round survey spanning two academic years. Their data was also linked to administrative records held by the English Government.

Statistical analysis confirmed that 11 of the 12 instruments above were reliable and conceptually sound, and stable across the three rounds of the survey. The conceptual framework was also shown to be valid, with many of the hypothesised relationships between the measured constructs borne out in the analysis. Preliminary analysis of the gain over time confirm the hypothesis that changes may be observed across all disciplines, and also that the patterns of change are not necessarily the same across all our institutions and subjects within. Interesting patterns of change are currently under further investigation, with the focus on the different linear and non-linear trajectories of learning gain by different subject and well as socio-economic and demographic groups.

Jenny Bergeron

Jenny Bergeron is Director of Educational Research and Evaluation at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. There, she oversees evaluation and research of Harvard’s leading educational initiatives. As a strong proponent of evidence-based policy and reform in higher education, Bergeron has a longstanding commitment of helping to envision and realize projects that can transform the practice of education at top American universities as well as research in higher education.

Over the past five years at Harvard, she has implemented a number of studies that have largely focused on how to best engage Harvard undergraduates from the academic, personal and social perspectives. Her efforts have helped the University in transforming its undergraduate general education curriculum, the redesign of new educational spaces, and the development of innovative pedagogical approaches that meet the diversity in learning needs of Harvard undergraduates. She is also currently working with academic leadership to study the implementation of Harvard’s first online degree program designed to serve M.D.s and other health care professionals both within the United States and abroad.

At Reimagine Education 2018, Jenny will appear alongside Sonia Ilie and Carla Aerts, also focusing on the tools, frameworks, and institutional frameworks needed to successfully evaluate, and foster, the success of learning initiatives.

Carla Aerts

Carla Aerts recently drew two years as Director of Futures at UCL’s Institute of Education to a close, where she also served as Deputy Director for the EDUCATE project. Her international digital career pioneering in the digital media landscape has spanned thirty years, and she is currently an advisor for e-Learning Africa.

She advises e-learning start-ups including Gojimo in the UK and AhadooTec in Ethiopia and is a mentor for Wedu Rising Star.

She has worked for international publishers, digital agencies, had her own consultancy, developed digital strategies, directed programmes & partnered on digital initiatives with Blue Chip Clients in Retail, Finance, Telecomms, Healthcare and Life Sciences. She has also worked with a number of start-ups in Healthcare, Technology and Lifestyle.

Having developed e-learning programmes for Healthcare and being asked by an international education publisher to manage their transition from the printed textbook to online and blended learning, she became totally absorbed by e-Learning & blended education. She worked on learning innovation for and with a number of education publishers, before going to Cambridge University Press where she developed digital learning strategies and product concepts as Global Digital Director.

At Reimagine 2018, she’ll join a truly-expert led session alongside Sonia Ilie of the University of Cambridge and Jenny Bergeron of Harvard’s University’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to examine ways in which innovation can prove, and enhance, its efficacy.