Approaches from the literature: Activity Theory, new tools and changing educators' practices

Abstract

For a study being undertaken to investigate if and how educator practices change through MOOC development and engagement with open education, Activity Theory provides a heuristic to observe contradictions and changing educator practices after the addition of new tools to a learning environment. Ours is a longitudinal study with cross case analysis of lead educators in 3-4 MOOCs, examining themes and contradictions emerging from the semi-structured data analysis to observe change in practices. In this poster we explore the question: how and why has activity theory been used to examine the introduction of new tools/mediating artefacts into the learning environment. A fuller version of our literature review is available at http://bit.ly/1jwyit3; our study’s design amalgamates the three approaches below. Our study is conducted by Laura Czerniewicz and the MOOC team at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching