Designing learning experiences for outdoor hybrid learning spaces

Abstract

AbstractWith the support of various personal and institutional mobile technologies, numerous physical and virtual spaces can be turned into interesting and motivating hybrid learning settings. By its nature, outdoor mobile learning happens on the move is connected to specific locations and settings inviting learners to study their surroundings, inquire about natural phenomena and solve complex real‐life problems. This poses challenges for teachers to design meaningful, contextualized and comprehensive learning experiences. The paper aims to explore what kind of mobile learning scenarios K‐12 teachers create and what are the limitations and development perspectives of these scenarios. Content analysis of 25 location‐based outdoor learning tracks with 465 questions and tasks was carried out. The results demonstrate that designing and implementing learning activities outside the safe, familiar classroom environment in new hybrid learning spaces is a challenging task for the teachers on many different levels. Taking Bloom’s revised taxonomy, types of contextualization and integrated learning models as frameworks for content analysis of the learning scenarios, the study shows that the teachers do not perceive the potential hybrid spaces and mobile technologies offer in order to design consistent learning experiences that emphasize higher order thinking levels, encompass contextual information and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplinary sources. The paper concludes that there is a need for more teacher training and systemic interventions into current teaching practices that encourage teachers to step outside of their existing teaching paradigms to acknowledge the pedagogical potential of hybrid learning spaces as well as the technological affordances.