Olof Bälter

Professor in Computer Science with a focus onlearning engineering. Founder of the research group for Technology Enhanced Learning.

Olle started out as an appreciated teacher and has been awarded repeatedly for his pedagogical achievements (among them Teacher of the Year at the Surveying program, KTH's pedagogical prize, and Higher Education Hero). His thesis on email usage made him a media darling that has spilled over into other areas. In 2006 he developed his first online course which has since had several thousands of students yearly. In 2008 he was awarded STINT's Excellence in Teaching scholarship and went as a guest teacher to Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA. This stint (and another in 2013 also to Williams College) facilitated the possibilities to spend a year as a guest researcher at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in California 2015-16. There he worked with the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and their questions-based learning (QBL) methodology. This collaboration also includes Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Back at KTH the QBL methodology was further developed into Pure QBL which we now are spreading both at KTH and at universities in Hong-Kong and Kigali.

Have you ever skipped a lecture to work on an assignment instead? Then you have intuitively realized what educational research has known for a long time: you learn best by working with problems, not by first studying the theory. As a consequence of this, Olle and colleagues have developed an effective method for learning with digital support: pure question-based learning. It can be seen as a digitilized version of Socratic teaching, where students first activate themselves by answering questions and then learn from the feedback they immediately receive on their answers. With the help of the click data that is collected, teachers can see at group level how the class has mastered the various learning goals and adapt their teaching accordingly. After the course, the same data is used to determine which parts of the course work well for learning and which work worse and thus need to be improved.

An advantage of this pure question-based learning is that generative AI can be used to create course material in a very time-efficient way, the time saving is over 90%, which makes it easy to create customized course material. Research studies show that students appreciate the AI-generated questions with feedback very much and would like to see it in more courses.

There are several ongoing projects with pure question-based course material. Partly to develop course material for KTH courses, but together with Region Stockholm and Stockholm University, Olle is developing a question-based course in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that will function as a self-help course on a large scale. Those who have mild mental problems today receive CBT as a form of treatment. By offering an online CBT course, we can give people tools to deal with the challenges they face, such as mild phobias, depression, eating disorders etc. This could possibly relieve the psychiatric health care. 

Together with Promobilia and Begripsam, we are also investigating how pure question-based learning works for people with attention challenges, such as ADHD. We have already received spontaneous comments from students with these challenges that the pure question-based learning material works much better for them than traditional teaching.

A consistent theme of Olle's research over the years has been to make the world more efficient: through better email management, user-friendly web surveys and health-promoting walking seminars. With the help of question-based learning, teaching at different levels and in different subjects in different countries can be more efficient for both students and teachers!