Ontological Specification of Telecollaborative Tasks in Language Teaching
5. Distributed design
Distributed Design can be considered an instructional design model for guiding the analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation (ADDIE) of educational artefacts for learning, testing and teaching. As a typical ADDIE model it is staged, with every stage having its own importance and specificity, its own input and output, but it is not necessarily a ‘waterfall’ model. Distributed Design is holistic in nature: it first designs an optimal learning environment (OLE) before deciding on intermediate steps and artefacts to be developed. It defines a learn- ing situation as the context, as ‘what is’, and the learning environment as what is being designed in our mind. The learning environment is defined as a collection of interacting components (ecology): actors (learner, teacher, parent), models (learning, teaching and evaluation model), content, infrastructure and technology.
5.1 Analysis
During the Analysis Stage, designers try to identify for each of these components which aspects are amenable to change which should and can be changed. The
first step is to analyze the local context: to what extent is it different from other contexts (local requirements) and which differences (differential requirements) can one observe within the local context regarding the components of the learn- ing environment? Designers identify which aspects can (italic) and should (bold) be changed.
Table 1: The analysis stage in Distributed Design
LOCAL DIFFERENTIAL
Learner Some learners are not motivated
enough Teacher Local teachers are not innovative
enough in their teaching methods Other
personas
Parents want to monitor the learning progress of their children Learning
model
Learners are expected to prepare the lessons in advance
Different learning paths are offered according to the most suitable degree of autonomy
Teaching model
Teachers see themselves as coaches rather than instructors
Evaluation model
There is no spreading of evaluation over self-, co- and peer-evaluation
Some students require specific forms of evaluation (written, oral, computer-assisted) due to psychological or physical limitations
Content Students co-construct course content
Some students prefer textbooks
Infrastructure Classrooms should be more
flexible and multi-functional ICT Classrooms equipped with
Interactive Whiteboards
Some rooms do not have wifi yet
5.2 Design
The Design Stage consists of three steps. During conceptualization, the main con- cept behind the learning environment is worked out as a compromise between conflicting personal and pedagogical goals (Colpaert 2010). This is the most diffi- cult part of the design process, as there is, up-to-date, no procedure for reconciling these goals. Let us take, as an example, a learning situation, a context, where we encounter the following conflicts:
• students should learn how to collaborate, but they/some of them do not want to do so;
• students should acquire attitude based on insight, but they prefer knowledge transfer;
• students should learn how to speak up, but most of them prefer to remain silent in the classroom.
A good conceptualization has the following advantages: it reconciles as many goal conflicts as possible, and the resulting concept should be clear for all stakeholders involved (even content and software developers). In the best case, it can lead to a metaphor for the entire learning environment such as a beehive, a library, a city, a factory or a casino. A metaphor that reconciles most conflicts creates accept- ance and willingness in the learner’s mind. This is why this metaphor should be reflected in the first message the learner receives about the learning environment:
the course description (which is mostly quite boring), the lesson schedule or the textbook used. During specification, this concept needs to be specified in detail in terms of what is needed. Pedagogical specification is the specification of what is needed in terms of theories and models (instructional design models such as 4C/ID) in order to be able to design a learning environment in a justifiable way.
Theories and models about learning (degree of autonomy), teaching (the role of the coach) and evaluation (co-, self-and peer-evaluation). Content specifica- tion is the description of the content that should be added or created in order to make the best possible learning environment: off-the-shelf, Open Educational Resources, co-authored, MOOCs (Colpaert 2014b) etc. Architectural specifica- tion is the description of interactions that need to take place inside and outside the classroom between all learners, teacher and content. Finally, this leads to the technological specification, meaning the description of functionalities needed to guarantee these interactions. During the prototyping stage, designers test to see if their requirements can be found or if they need to be created/developed. This is the case for the teaching model, the learning model, the evaluation model, content, infrastructure and ICT.
5.3 Development
The Development stage is the actual elaboration of pedagogical approach, content and technology.
5.4 Implementation
During the Implementation stage designers observe and monitor phenomena which may be expected or unexpected, not immediately with a view on the prod- uct, but in order to adjust the design process parameters in place.
5.5 Evaluation
Although the Evaluation stage does not immediately try to measure or prove anything, it is the central tenet of the educational engineering approaching as it tries to validate the formulated hypothesis by comparing the expected outcome with the actual outcome (‘I expect my students to be happier if […]; I expect my students to be more active if my role as coach […].’) in order to formulate a new hypothesis for the next loop to be undertaken.