Supporting awareness in communities of learning design practice

Abstract

The field of learning design has extensively studied the use of technology for the authoring of learning activities. However, the social dimension of the learning design process is still underexplored. In this paper, we investigate communities of teachers who used a social learning design platform (ILDE). We seek to understand how community awareness facilitates the learning design activity of teachers in different educational contexts. Following a design-based research methodology, we developed a community awareness dashboard (inILDE) based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework. The dashboard displays the activity of teachers in ILDE, such as their interactions with learning designs, other members, and with supporting learning design tools. Evaluations of the inILDE dashboard were carried out in four educational communities – two secondary schools, a master programme for pre-service teachers, and in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for teachers. The dashboard was perceived to be useful in summarizing the activity of the community and in identifying content and members' roles. Further, the use of the dashboard increased participants' interactions such as profile views and teachers showed a willingness to build on the contributions of others. As conclusions of the study, we propose five design principles for supporting awareness in learning design communities, namely community context, practice-related insights, visualizations and representations, tasks and community interests.