Course Overview

Course Title: Educational Challenges: Status and Solution Design

Relevant SDGs: SDG 3, SDG 4

Credit(s): 2 (32 teaching hours)

Course Description:

This course is a summer course for undergraduates. It primarily introduces some of the prominent challenges existing in the current global education system. Through a hands-on approach, the course aims to inspire students to design potential solutions to these challenges, enhancing their innovative thinking and practical abilities.

The main teaching content includes: (1) Global Education Status and Challenges: Discussing issues of global significance such as education accessibility, equity, and quality. (2) Technology and Education: Delving deep into how technology impacts education, including the digital divide, opportunities and challenges of online education, and how technology transforms teaching methods. (3) Diversity and Inclusivity in Education: Exploring how to cater to students of different backgrounds, abilities, and needs, including special education and multicultural education. (4) Educational Design Research Methods.

The primary learning objectives of this course are: (1) To learn and understand the main challenges in the contemporary education system, including the themes and underlying historical, societal, economical, and cultural reasons. (2) To learn and master educational design research methods. (3) To co-create solutions to educational challenges based on educational design methods.

Specifically, the course aims to foster the following abilities in students: (1) Understanding and Analytical Skills: To understand and analyze the main challenges faced by contemporary education, as well as the social, economic, and technological factors behind these challenges. (2) Critical Thinking Skills. (3) Practical and Application Skills: Students will learn how to design and implement effective educational methods to address specific educational challenges. (4) Interdisciplinary Collaboration Skills: Encouraging students to collaborate with peers from different backgrounds and fields to jointly explore and solve educational issues.

Academic Team

PI:

• Xin Tang, Associate Professor, SJTU School of Education，xin.tang@sjtu.edu.cn

Collaborators:

• Jiesi Guo, Associate Professor, Australian Catholic University, jiesi.guo@acu.edu.au 
• Sanna Read, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science, s.read@lse.ac.uk
• Maija Aksela, Professor, University of Helsinki, maija.aksela@helsinki.fi 
• Henna Asikainen, Senior Lecturer, University of Helsinki, henna.asikainen@helsinki.fi

What skills will students get?

1. Understanding and Analytical Skills: To understand and analyze the main challenges faced by contemporary education, as well as the social, economic, and technological factors behind these challenges.
2. Critical Thinking Skills. 
3. Practical and Application Skills: Students will learn how to design and implement effective educational methods to address specific educational challenges. 
4. Interdisciplinary Collaboration Skills: Encouraging students to collaborate with peers from different backgrounds and fields to jointly explore and solve educational issues.

Mode of Teaching

Lecture, Group Discussion, Presentation

Grading

1. Attendance and In-class engagement: 50%;
2. Group presentation: 50%

Course-specific Restrictions

None.

Class Schedule

Instructors

Xin Tang

Dr. Xin Tang is an associate professor at the School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He also holds the title of Docent (equivalent to Associate Professor) at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

His research topics include motivation and engagement, academic wellbeing, social-emotional development, and teaching practices. So far, he has over 30 peer-reviewed publications. As a lead author, his work has been appeared in highly regarded journals, such as Learning and Instruction, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Teaching and Teacher Education, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence (SSCI-Q1), Learning and Individual Differences (SSCI-Q1), Educational Psychology (SSCI-Q2), Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (SSCI-Q2), and Frontiers in Psychology (SSCI-Q2).

Maija Aksela

Maija Aksela is full Professor at the University of Helsinki, and is also the Finland’s first professor of science education. She has more than 35 years of experience in developing both teaching and teacher training in STEM subjects, as well as creating new and inspiring teaching methods. She has published roughly 400 scholarly publications and supervised numerous doctoral and other theses. Her research focus areas include virtual methods of teaching and sustainability in teaching.

Sanna Read

Sanna Read is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her areas of expertise are well-being and health, service use, social contacts and socioeconomic factors in middle and older age. Part of her work focuses on costs of autism and financing adult social care. She is also interested in social inequalities and school engagement, school burnout, and mental health in young people. She uses a range of longitudinal and multilevel methods, especially those based on structural equation modelling. She works as a methods advisor in various research projects and as an assessor for epidemiological statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her publications range from papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals to policy documents.

Henna Asikainen

Henna Asikainen is a Senior lecturer at the University of Helsinki and a research director in Wells project. She received the Title of Docent (equivalent as Associate Professor) in university pedagogy in 2018. Her research focuses on the relationship between learning and wellbeing and supporting and developing students wellbeing and lifelong learning skills with interventions courses. She mainly works in the WELLS Promoting university students’ well-being and life-long learning -project and is a PI in Wells R2B project which aims to develop wellbeing interventions for international educational institutions as well as companies. To date, she has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers on the topics of wellbeing, learning, and teaching. The research was done using multi-method approach such as quantitative, qualitative and biophysical measures. 

Lixiang (Jimmie) Yan

Dr. Lixiang (Jimmie) Yan is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Learning Analytics within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. His research focuses on (1) advancing generative artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal learning analytics to improve human learning experiences; (2) exploring the ethical and practical implications of large language models in education and learning analytics; and (3) leveraging socio-spatial data to understand and design interactive learning environments. As a first and corresponding author, his research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Educational Psychology, and British Journal of Educational Technology, and presented at top-tier conferences including the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) and the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). Dr. Yan has been recognized with several awards, including the Best Full Paper Award at LAK22 and Wiley's Top Cited Article recognition for 2021-2022. His research transforms education by shaping how data and AI guide learning practices.

Course Contact

Xin Tang: xin.tang@sjtu.edu.cn