Chapter 7: Research and Development 4. Rethink Teacher Professional Development: How can we solve for new systems of teacher professional development (both pre-service and in-service) that align to the increasingly core role of technology in the teaching profession? “We can't necessarily always apply traditional research methodologies to this topic because educational technology changes so quickly.” —Kristina Ishmael, Office of Educational Technology 7.2. Attention to the Long Tail of Learner Variability At the core of R&D of AI in education, innovators will be building models that fit available data. The increasing scale and prevalence of technologies means that the data is coming from and including a wide range of different contexts and varied ways that people in those contexts engage in teaching and learning. Researchers in our listening sessions drew attention to the promise of AI for addressing “context” by reference to the long tail of learner variability. Figure 13: The long tail of learner variability 75 | P a g e
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