Pedagogic strategies to support learning design thinking in a masters course

Abstract

The demand for further skills and qualifications in the educational technology field remains strong as the range of technologies increases and their potential use in educational contexts becomes more compelling. Students registering for the University of Cape Town (UCT) Masters level courses are employed in schools, government agencies, universities, non-governmental organisations, or in the corporate sector, where their role in designing educational technology interventions represents part of their responsibilities. Because they have varying levels of experience in designing educational materials and/or using educational technologies, they need to develop learning design thinking and gain practice with a broad range of pedagogic strategies, theories, and technology tools to be productive in the workplace. Over the past four years we have developed and adopted a course for the needs of people who are keen to apply these skills in their work contexts. We describe here, the pedagogic strategies we explicitly adopted to model and support learning design thinking in one of four modules, Online Learning Design. The module adopts a learning design framework developed by Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland (2005) to introduce students to design processes, and uses the same framework as a loose structure for the module and assignments. We apply Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland's classification of pedagogic strategies to model and analyse approaches to cultivating learning design thinking amongst the students. As an analytic advice, we draw on Engeström's (2001) Activity Theory to describe the evolving learning context and our changing pedagogic strategies over four years. We focus on key tensions that emerged from the adoption of a range of pedagogic strategies to cultivate the students' learning design thinking when developing learning activities to communicate complex design issues. The key social change highlighted in this paper is that educational technology educators aiming to cultivate students' learning design thinking, need to apply their design thinking to their own practice.