Marcus Specht

Background

Marcus Specht is professor for Digital Education at the department of Software Technologies at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Marcus has a background in psychology and adaptive information technology, with a special interest in educational research and innovation. Over the years, Marcus has been involved in many educational research projects on topics including, but not limited to, open and competence-based education, learning analytics, intelligent learning support, and mobile and ubiquitous learning. In his teaching, Marcus is an advocate of project-based learning. By combining the latter with blended learning tools, he wishes to provide students with the kind of learning environment where they can practice with e.g. collaborative problem solving, understanding each other’s perspective, and teamwork and communication skills.

Towards IDEE

Marcus would love to see a stronger connection between educational research and innovation in the teaching room. However, this requires a space where people can come together to exchange experiences and information, discuss important topics, and gather and collect new data from a variety of settings. This is one of the reasons why Marcus is excited about IDEE, since it has the potential to become precisely such a central hub that could facilitate these kinds of exchanges. With regards to the IDEE themes, Marcus felt the strongest connection to the theme of Students taking responsibility for their own learning process. Student responsibility is closely tied to concepts such as self-regulation, self-determination, and learner agency. Given Marcus’ extensive theoretical knowledge in this field, he decided to join the theme and wishes to contribute through this lens.

As part of IDEE

“With IDEE, I hope we will be able to further enhance a culture of educational research in education innovation. Because, currently, I think we have too little evidence-informed or -based decision-making in changing and innovating education. In this way, we would be working towards the professional lecturer, who reflects on their methods and keeps developing them further, keeps asking themselves: are things good the way they are, and where can I improve?”

Did you know that ...?

• Since 2008, Marcus is full Professor for Learning Technologies at the Educational Technology Expertise Centre of the Open University of the Netherlands
• From 2014, Marcus has chaired the board of the Welten Institute, Research Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.
• Since 2018, Marcus has been Director at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning (CEL).
• Since 2020, Marcus is Member of the Board and Delft Leader for the 4TU Centre for Engineering Education.