Abstract
Open educational resources (OER) play an important role in teaching and learning, especially in lifelong learning. Educational resources should be created in a way that addresses lifelong learners’ needs. Human-centered design (HCD) is a design perspective and an iterative process that involves users in all phases of the process. Thus, an HCD approach can provide relevant advantages when creating OER for lifelong learning. This work presents the Design Toolkit as a case study of digital open educational contents for design education that has been created following an HCD process. The orientation of the Design Toolkit is to provide users OER in a tool format rather than in a traditional manner. The main goal of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how HCD impacts OER creation. The research focuses on teachers, assessing the Design Toolkit content organization and analyzing teacher adoption and usage of the resources. The HCD approach fosters teachers’ satisfaction, promotes OER adoption and provides new design requirements for a future iteration of the HCD process. The results show that designing OER involving users through an HCD approach sets the focus adequately on their needs and limitations. Teachers feel satisfied with the Design Toolkit, fostering the adoption of OER in different educational contexts. Finally, users’ involvement in the whole HCD process points out design and educational requirements for future work.
Highlights
User-centered design (UCD) is both defined as a process and as a philosophy
Open educational resources (OER) “are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others”. [16]
We presented the advantages of designing and creating open educational resources as tools rather than in a traditional format through an iterative human-centered design process
Summary
User-centered design (UCD) is both defined as a process and as a philosophy. As a design process, it is an approach to plan projects and a set of methods to be used in each phase. Human-centered design (HCD) provides a broader mindset to UCD, emphasizing the humanistic approach and the way in which technology is designed [3]. This design approach has a direct link with the human pillar of sustainability, which focuses on the importance of involving users in the making of products or services [4]. Lifelong learning is the process of learning that occurs during each person’s lifetime [10] This way of learning often implies that learners combine their educational and professional life. In this scenario, distance learning programs enable students to balance and adapt the learning progress to their availability and needs. Open educational resources (OER) “are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others”. [16]
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