Professor Mike Sharples

Mike Sharples is Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology in the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University.

Background

Mike's research involves human-centred design of new technologies and environments for learning. He advises policy makers on digital transformations. He inaugurated the mLearn conference series and was Founding President of the International Association for Mobile Learning. As Academic Lead for the FutureLearn company, he informed the design of its social learning approach. 

Away from his research work, Mike is Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. He is lead author of the Innovating Pedagogy report series and author of over 300 papers in the areas of educational technology, science education, human-centred design of personal technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Research interests

• Pedagogy-led digital transformations of education
• Design of innovative technologies and environments for learning
• Inquiry-led citizen science
• Social learning at massive scale

Qualifications

• PhD, 1984, University of Edinburgh, Thesis Title: 'Cognition, Computers and Creative Writing'
• Computational Science, B.Sc. (Hons), 1976, St. Andrews University

Research grants, consultancy, knowledge exchange

• 2017-18 Grant from Open University/BBC partnership, Tomorrow’s World nQuire. £160,000
• 2012-2015 Grant from European Commission, JUXTALEARN. Co-investigator. Total funding, €2,099,403, OU €623,781
• 2012-2013 Grant from Wolfson Foundation for OpenScience Laboratory. Co-investigator, £1 million
• 2009-12 Grant from European Commission, STELLAR European Network of Excellence. Total funding € 4,993,330. As Principal Investigator, € 201,312
• 2009-11 UKRC Digital Economy Research Hub, ‘Horizon’ (EP/G065802/1). Co-investigator. £12.5 million

Selected recent publications

Herodotou, C., Sharples, M., Scanlon, E. (eds., 2017). Citizen Inquiry: Synthesizing Science and Inquiry Learning. (London: Routledge).

Sharples, M., Aristeidou, M., Villasclaras-Fernández, E., Herodotou, C., Scanlon, E., 2017. Sense-it: A Smartphone Toolkit for Citizen Inquiry Learning. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 9(2), pp. 16-38.

Sharples, M., Scanlon, E., Ainsworth, S., Anastopoulou, S., Collins, T., Crook, C., Jones, A., Kerawalla, L., Littleton, K., Mulholland, P., O’Malley, C., 2015. Personal Inquiry: Orchestrating Science Investigations Within and Beyond the Classroom. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), pp. 308-341.

Roy, A., Sharples, M., 2015. Mobile Game Based Learning: Can it enhance learning of marginalized peer educators? International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 7(1), pp. 1-13.