Tarmo Toikkanen

Information Architecture and Design Solutions Scaffolding Authoring of Open Educational Resources

This paper presents the open learning object repository and collaborative authoring platform LeMill (http://lemill.net), which has over 7,500 members and over 8,500 reusable learning resources (situation in October 30th, 2009), all created by the community members. The design of LeMill has tackled numerous challenges that hinder the authoring and sharing of educational resources by communities of teachers. This paper describes the research-based design process that was used to solve these challenges. The information architecture of LeMill scaffolds authors toward collaboration and sharing. The licensing scheme encourages reusing and remixing of educational content. In order to make LeMill easy to learn and use we have avoided technical terminology and complicated metadata forms in the user interface. As an open community we have also tackled multicultural and multilingual issues. In this paper, we present the information architecture and design of LeMill, including the technical solutions. We believe that our design solutions will contribute to the goal of creating an open educational resource ecosystem.

The Code ABC MOOC: Experiences from a Coding and Computational Thinking MOOC for Finnish Primary School Teachers

The Finnish primary school curriculum will feature programming and computational thinking as mandatory cross-curricular elements in all teaching starting from the first grade. Many teachers are quite concerned about this and feel ill-prepared. A group of volunteers created a MOOC for teachers and, with no budget, trained over 500 primary school teachers to be competent teachers of programming (38% of the participants). The results from a study conducted within the course indicate that Finnish teachers seem to think that coding is an important addition to the school curriculum and they exhibit low levels of anxiety over it. The MOOC design focused on connectivist design principles (cMOOC) and was considered extremely successful by the participants. The MOOC participants seemed confident that the MOOC would equip them to face the new challenge, and indeed, the feedback from the MOOC and its results support this.

Designing Edukata, a Participatory Design Model for Creating Learning Activities

Closing gaps between visionary ideas and classroom practice was the key achievement of the design research and work of the iTEC project. The design activities were based on the traditions of Scandinavian participatory design, activity theory, service design, artistry, and a specific view on learning design. Within iTEC, the design research and work brought forward the concept of Learning Activities as a useful mode of communicating new ideas to teachers that provided both challenges and support for overcoming those challenges. Evaluation results showed that Learning Activities were extremely successful. This success led to the need to ensure the continuation of Learning Activity design and production beyond the project. The design approach for creating the Learning Activities was captured for educators in the Edukata toolkit. Radical simplification yielded a model that seems to be valuable for teachers even with small amounts of training. However, the full impact of this model and its applicability in the diverse school learning settings across Europe remains to be validated. In this article we present the design research process and one of its main results: the Edukata toolkit for teachers to design their own Learning Activities to bridge the gap between tie visionary ideas and classroom practice.

Facilitating Student Reflection through Digital Technologies in the iTEC Project: Pedagogically-Led Change in the Classroom

During the Europe-wide iTEC project, student reflection has been supported through the development of two dedicated digital tools: TeamUp and ReFlex. Using these tools, students are able to monitor their progress, thus gaining a greater awareness of their learning achievements and an appreciation of the new skills they have developed. Although TeamUp and ReFlex have been well-received by teachers and students, the use of audio-visual tools to support reflection was novel for most and the project evaluation highlighted the need for detailed guidance if these technologies are to be exploited to their full advantage.