東京工業大学 環境・社会理工学院 融合理工学系. クロス研究室
Tokyo Institute of Technology, School of Environment and Society
Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering
Meet The Team
Jon Doe
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Jane Doe
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James Doe
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クロス研究室の教育工学グループ
クロス研究室の教育工学グループの学生は、メタ認知、個人向けオンライン適応学習システム(POALS)の開発、VR(仮想現実)支援型言語学習、AI支援型ライティング、小学生のプログラム教育、生涯学習、3D 360度ビデオによる学習者エンゲージメントの向上、アイトラッキングと画像など、様々なテーマに取り組んでいます。特に、教育工学と人工知能をどのように組み合わせれば、学生の学習を改善できるか、そして、これらの新しい手法の有効性を評価できるかに関心があります。
Luc
Promoting University Students and Elementary School Teachers to Become Lifelong Learners Through Play
Tony
Embodiment and Iconicity for Second Language Learning in Virtual Reality
John
AI-based Writing Assistants' Impact on English Language Learners’ Writing Proficiency
May
Personalized Online Adaptive Learning System (POALS)
Luc Gougeon (LUC)
Luc is a third-year Canadian working adult doctoral student. His research focuses on educational policies and computational thinking. He is interested in understanding if Japanese in-service teachers are ready to teach programming in 2020. Luc has been living in Japan since 2008 and has been working as a university lecturer since 2015. Luc uses technology in his classes on a daily basis and hopes that his research will help him train the new generation of educators.
Promoting University Students and Elementary School Teachers to Become Lifelong Learners Through Play
In 2020, Japanese primary school educators will face the difficult challenge of introducing programming in their classes despite the fact that they never studied programming themselves. Our research aims are mapping the specific contours of the knowledge gap in-service teachers and extend this surveying to current universities students who are also lacking computer literacy skills. Most research in the field of computer literacy places a strong emphasis on children while neglecting the needs of in-service educators and older students. We will tackle this research by both surveying a range of students and teachers while conducting case studies consisting of an education intervention meant to give university students a quick grasp of computational thinking, computer literacy and basic programming concepts. The case study approach intends to offer students essentials skills in an active learning environment, skills which will be transferable to their future workplace or classroom if they intend to become educators. The results of this study are intended to offer stakeholders and policy-makers a clearer picture of the current educational landscape and enlighten their decisions. Below is an illustration of summarizing the issues which will be investigated related to education approaches and students’ knowledge needs.
Robert Anthony Olexa (Tony)
Robert Anthony Olexa is conducting research on Japanese students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) in tertiary educational settings funded by a JSPS Kakenhi grant. The research focuses on how students use iconic gestures and embodied communication to acquire English in virtual environments. The compilation of an ongoing Virtual Reality (VR) Chat language learner corpus cross-referenced with video data and multimodal analysis is used to observe how embodied learning contributes to students’ EFL learning progress.
Embodiment and Iconicity for English as a Foreign Language Learning in Virtual Reality
Iconicity is a term used to describe communicative elements that closely resemble their referents. A degree of iconicity when communicating between caregiver and learner has been recognized as necessary for first language acquisition. Also, the usefulness of iconic gestures has been intuited by educators for second language acquisition as evidenced through the broader educational approach of “Active Learning,” and more concentrated EFL approaches such as Total Physical Response. However, the limitations are known, and the Japanese EFL setting remains situated in the classroom. At current, the learning experience is delivered mainly through passive activities.
Recent advancements in commercial VR technology have allowed for 6 degrees of freedom of movement (see below). Participants can move around in virtual environments with increased space and movement, allowing for embodied communication and iconic gestures. The liberation from a traditional classroom environment can improve EFL teaching and learning in Japan as a whole. Also, the findings may point to needed areas of improvement for software developers and designers of extended reality devices.
John Maurice Gayed (John)
John is a third-year American working adult doctoral student. He is interested in computer assisted language learning, learning management systems, information literacy and digital learning. John is a tech enthusiast and a full-time university lecturer teaching English for Academic Purposes among other courses at the University of Hyogo’s School of Engineering.
AI-based Writing Assistants' Impact on English Language Learners’ Writing Proficiency
John is currently researching the potential to use an AI-based writing assistant for second language learners at Cross lab. Little research has been done on how these systems affect L2 writing output and the researcher believes these systems will be as prevalent as spell-checking/grammar checking systems that were first developed more than thirty years ago. He plans to develop these tools to assist Japanese university students who are enrolled in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses overcome the various cognitive barriers they face when they attempt to produce written text in English. The researcher is developing the AI system based on Open AI’s GPT-2 language model. The expected outcome of the research is that AI-based writing assistants can improve students' writing fluency.
May Kristine Jonson Carlon (MAY)
May is a Filipino postdoctoral researcher studying ways to improve the online learning experience through the use of metacognitive tutoring, adaptive learning, and harvesting of implicit feedback through natural language processing. You can learn more about her academic work through her website, maycarlon.com.
Personalized Online Adaptive Learning System (POALS)
POALS is a web-based system designed to help learners succeed in online learning environments. To succeed in online learning environments where instructor support might be less compared to face-to-face instruction, learners must be trained to be autonomous by equipping them with metacognitive skills. However, teaching metacognition inevitably introduces cognitive strain, which can vary among individuals. Thus, we introduce adaptive learning to personalize each learning experience. We tap into the teachers as learning facilitators by creating an analytics dashboard to give implicit feedback to teachers that they can use to provide interventions if necessary. This research is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) via Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) grant (Kakenhi 20H01719) from April 2020 to March 2025. This serves as the bulk of my doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral research.
