Cheryl is a Vice Principal at the Toronto Catholic District School Board.

I am a post-doc at EPFL, Lausanne. I did my MA thesis in the Higher Education Program at OISE, with Dr. Ruth Hayhoe and Dr. Jim Slotta. My thesis focused on the Chinese National Top Level Courses project. After completing the thesis, I have been experimenting with ways of disseminating it in several formats, and through many channels. In September 2010, I began my PhD in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, with Dr. Jim Slotta. My PhD will focus on how to enable collaborative peer-based learning around Open Educational Resources.

Amy is a PhD student in the Scientific Reasoning and Argumentation (REASON) program at the University of Munich. She is currently interested in the intersection of active learning, mathematical reasoning and argumentation, and human-computer interaction design. Her upcoming research will involve the development of tangible technologies and active learning activities to engage students and form a learning community curricula.

She works with Dr. Heinrich Hussmann, Dr. Jim Slotta, and Dr. Frank Fischer on the interdisciplinary research about (1) how to evaluate group progress during activities, (2) how intelligent agents can be employed to respond to immediate group needs.

Gaoxia Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Curriculum & Pedagogy Program at OISE, University of Toronto. Her research lies at the intersection of learning sciences, curriculum studies, and educational technology with a focus on understanding and supporting students’ social, cognitive, and emotional dynamics with the support of learning analytics in collaborative inquiry learning environments. She works with Dr. Marlene Scardamalia and Dr. Jim Slotta on conducting design experiments to support students’ productive knowledge building and emotional well-being at the elementary and graduate school levels, respectively. To broaden her research on students’ interactions in technology-enhanced environments, she participated in two collaborative National Science Foundation-funded projects. Through the projects, she investigated how students’ transformative and non-transformative discourse related to their conceptual learning and problem-solving performance, as well as how students’ engineering design behaviors, regulation behaviors, and design iterations influence their design performance in a 3D engineering design environment. Her articles have been published in journals such as the Internet and Higher Education, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Computers & Education, and Computers in Human Behaviors.

Paul is a Ph.D. candidate within the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Paul spent several years abroad teaching digital media, instructional technology, course design and educational technology at the graduate-level to teacher candidates. With respect to professional development and research, most of Paul’s efforts have centred around online culture and teacher education exchanges with small, but dynamic cohorts of professors from Europe, North America, and Asia. Utilizing a learning management system with embedded communicative technologies, Paul has explored the affordances of social presence through the use of video/web conferencing, discussion forums, audio slideshows, as well as student-created audio/video clips, digital mashups, and wikis.

Upon returning to the University of Toronto, Paul has continued his professional development of implementing online and blended learning approaches in education, while customizing content and learning management systems. To this end, Paul wishes to further explore online learning environments and questions concerning how teacher education may be enhanced, utilizing a combination of collaborative pedagogies and integration of virtual and augmented realities.