The LEAD Learning Communities comprise a collaborative network of teachers, researchers, and students who interact to address a variety of issues related to LEAD that are common to their community. These issues are defined in more detail under the description and goals of each LEAD Learning Community. The principal driver in the development of LEAD Learning Communities is to enable and foster a two-way interaction between the LEAD developers and LEAD users to maximize the overall effectiveness of LEAD. Each learning community will 1) Integrate LEAD applications into their domain of activity, 2) develop new applications, 3) create performance outcomes for both education and research, 4) provide feedback to LEAD developers so that user needs drive the design and development process, 5) determine potential relevance of LEAD technologies to other related fields. Furthermore, LEAD Learning Community members will serve as liaisons to the broader communities of education and research.
In light of the many ways in which students, teachers, and researchers might be clustered together, we have chosen to develop two LEAD Learning Communities: