Industry Partners

For learning technologies research to have a significant and sustainable impact on educational practice it must involve all educational stakeholders, not just academic researchers. CILT identified the education technology industry as a partner that can (i) ensure that research is responsive to the needs of the education market, and (ii) create productive educational solutions based on research findings.

To work with companies interested in improving education through research-based innovations, CILT created the Industry Alliance Program (IAP). Over the past five years the IAP has been evolving to best meet the needs of industry representatives, researchers, and educators. Industry Alliance members participate in CILT projects, including the CILT conferences, CILT research, and other CILT events.

Senior Industry Alliance Member:
     Intel

Associate Industry Members:
     Sun
     PASCO
     Palm, Inc.

IAP sponsored efforts:

• The Handheld Design Awards for Education. This contest for educational applications for handheld computers was announced in 1999, and the final event was held in 1999. CILT sponsored this event to promote awareness of the affordances of handheld computers in education. Awards for outstanding applications were given on March 6, 2000, at an event that was Webcast live from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
http://www.ciltkn.org/palm99/


• Intel's "Seeing Reason" tool. The CILT Causal Mapping tool, developed by CILT's Synergy project has been ported to the Intel Innovation in Education website.
  http://www97.intel.com/scripts-seeingreason/



• CILT 2002 Ubiquitous Computing Workshop. The IAP helped to sponsor and host the CILT 2002 Ubiquitous Computing Workshop.



• CILT workshop and conferences. Industry sponsorship and participation was vital to the success of the CILT conferences.
  CILT 2000 Sponsors
  CILT 1999 Sponsors

The evolution of the IAP program:

CILT identified the following principles as vital to the success of the Industry Alliance Program:

• Intellectual Property (IP): CILT is committed to open sharing of IP. This is often difficult for companies that are under pressure to get profitable products to market.



• Corporate structure: True "partnerships" require that research institutions work with a company's core business, as opposed to their philanthropic arm which provides donations rather than partnerships. Although corporate organizations provide the best leverage points, they are often much more limited in the funds they have at their disposal for CILT alliance purposes.



• Benefits: Benefits are more likely to be achieved through joint work and direct access to researchers than simply access to research findings.

These issues left us with an interesting challenge: to create open IP agreements with companies' corporate arms in the area of educational technology. Compounding this challenge was the fact that most of the CILT effort was based on fostering cross-institutional research through seed grants, with the CILT core institutions playing a supporting role.

Different models for the Industry Alliance Program included involving corporate research arms in CILT core institution research, and "brokering" arrangements, in which CILT would take an area of interest to an industry partner and find researchers willing to work with that partner. These models were of marginal success, and we decided on a more "organic" approach based on three particularly productive activity types:

• leveraging our relationships with industry in finding areas of mutual interest (such as Intel's use of the CILT Causal Mapping tool on their education website; and working with Palm on the Palm Education Pioneer program)



• offering event-driven activities such as our annual conference and the Handheld Design Awards contest



• acting as an enabling agent for other, more research-oriented activities such as seed grants

In this way the CILT IAP has fostered significant collaborations between research and industry, including not only the Palm Education Pioneer program and the Intel Innovation in Education website, but many projects funded through CILT seed grants.

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© 1997-2008 Center for Innovative Learning Technology. All rights reserved.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation