Human-centred design methods to empower 'teachers as designers'

The present datasets have been used for the paper entitled "Human-centred design methods to empower ‘teachers as designers’".

Abstract

Teachers are learning designers, often unwittingly. To facilitate this role of ‘teachers as designers’, educators of all sectors need to adopt a design mindset and acquire the skills needed to address the design challenges they encounter in their everyday practice. Human-centred design (HCD) provides professional designers with the methods needed to address complex problems. It emphasises the human perspective throughout the design lifecycle and provides a practice-oriented, context-aware, empathetic and incremental approach which naturally fits educators realities.

This research reports on a MOOC designed to ‘walk’ educators through the design of an ICT-based learning activity following an HCD process and its techniques. A mixed methods approach is used to gauge how participants experienced the MOOC and the various design tasks it comprises. Although the perceived level of difficulty and value on the different methods varied - and, significant differences were seen between the experience of novice and expert educators-, the participants felt the overall approach constituted a powerful means for them to design technology-enhanced learning activities. The results support the idea of HCD as a valuable framework for educators and inform ongoing international efforts to shape a science and practice of learning design for teaching.