Marcus Specht joins PERL as Professor of Digital Education
Marcus Specht, director of the LDE Center of Education and Learning, has been appointed as Professor of Digital Education since November 15. He has joint appointments at the three LDE universities. In Leiden he will join Felienne Hermans in the Programming Education Research Lab (PERL).
Digital media and tools in education
Specht's research focus is on Computational Thinking, Learning Analytics, AI in Education, and Virtual and Augmented Reality for Education. He researches the use of digital media and tools in education, the acquisition of skills to use digital tools, and efficient and effective ways to use IT in education. Major questions surrounding the topic of Computational Thinking, Digital Skills, and Learning Programming are the renewal of the curriculum, the development and role of Computational Thinking in professional profiles of the future, and hybrid Human-Robot Interaction.
Marcus Specht obtained his degree in Psychology in 1995 and a PhD in Adaptive Information Technology from the University of Trier in 1998. Since 2001, he has led the "Mobile Knowledge" department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT). From 2005 to 2018 he was Professor of Learning Technologies at the Open University of the Netherlands and head of the Learning Innovation Lab. Specht was head of the VSNU Digital Society Agenda Digital Learning and chairman (2013-2015) of the International Association of Mobile Learning.