The Multimodal Evidence Hub is a new research space run by the TLC Lab in McGill University's Faculty of Education. Made possible through a $930,000 investment from the Canada Foundation for Innovation through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the Hub gives our team, students, and collaborators new ways to study what happens while people learn with technology.

The Hub allows us to study educational apps, games, artificial intelligence, adaptive technologies, virtual and augmented reality, simulations, and other digital learning tools. Our goal is to understand when these technologies support learning, how learners experience them, and how they can be designed and used more effectively.

Seeing Learning as It Happens

What makes the Hub exciting is our ability to capture multiple forms of evidence about learning at the same time.

We can examine where learners look, what they click or do, how they respond emotionally, how they interact with other learners, and what they ultimately learn. Bringing these different measures together gives us a much richer picture of the learning experience and helps us understand why a technology works, where learners struggle, and which features could be improved.

For Dr. Dubé and the TLC team, this greatly expands the kinds of questions we can ask in our research on educational apps, games, AI, and other emerging technologies. For example, we can investigate whether learners are attending to important educational content or distracting features, when they become engaged or frustrated, how they navigate a digital environment, and how these experiences relate to learning.

Inside the Hub

The Hub has 20 digital learning stations arranged in an active learning classroom configuration. This means we can study one learner, small groups, or a class of learners while maintaining the measurement capabilities of a research space.

Our equipment includes:

• Eye tracking systems for studying attention and visual behaviour
• Electrodermal activity sensors for measuring physiological arousal
• High resolution cameras and facial expression analysis
• Screen recording and interaction data capture
• Virtual and augmented reality equipment
• Tablets and laptops
• Tools for recording and studying conversation and collaboration
• Software for synchronizing and analyzing multiple forms of data

We also have portable equipment that allows us to bring many of these methods into schools, homes, and other learning environments.

What We Will Do

The Hub will support and expand the TLC Lab's research on how people select, use, and learn with technology.

One major focus will be the independent evaluation of educational technologies. Dr. Dubé's work has examined how educational apps and games are designed, how parents and educators choose them, and how children learn with them. The Hub will allow us to bring these areas together by studying learners' attention, emotions, behaviour, interactions, and learning outcomes as they use different technologies.

We will also use the Hub to develop and test new ways of evaluating EdTech. Our aim is to generate evidence that can help educators and families choose better technologies while also helping developers understand how their designs work with real learners.

Work With Us

We want the Multimodal Evidence Hub to be a resource for collaboration.

If you are a researcher, we can work together on questions that require advanced measures of learning, attention, emotion, behaviour, or interaction.

If you are a company developing educational technology, we can independently study how learners experience your technology, where they encounter difficulties, what captures their attention, and whether particular design features support learning.

If you are an educator or educational organization, we can explore questions about how technologies work when they are placed in the hands of learners and teachers.

And if you are a student interested in joining the TLC Lab, the Hub provides opportunities to gain experience with eye tracking, physiological measures, video and interaction analysis, multimodal research, and the study of emerging educational technologies.

From Research to Resources

We want what we learn in the Hub to reach the people making decisions about educational technology.

Alongside our academic research, the TLC team will use findings from the Hub to create independent EdTech evaluations, practical recommendations, professional development materials, videos, podcasts, and other public resources.

Ultimately, the Multimodal Evidence Hub gives the TLC Lab a new way to answer the question at the centre of much of our work: What happens when people learn with technology, and how can we make that experience better?