Language Teachers and Students in Higher Education Co-Designing for Augmented Reality-Enhanced Learning

Augmented reality (AR), a technology that blends the real and virtual world, is increasingly being used by educators. Nevertheless, there is still a dearth of research exploring the design process of how teachers and students create AR-enhanced learning experiences using their knowledge of educational contexts and learning needs. This thesis argues that teachers’ and students’ roles can be expanded to interaction design for learning technologies. It contributes primarily to the research on learning design and participatory design. Creating a sketch helps identify teachers’ and students’ needs as they define the initial characteristics of a learning technology they may use. This thesis has implications for the design of design workshops and teacher-ready design methods. For this research project, I studied existing design practices to inform recommendations for developing future design capacity, practices, tools, and forms of professional development. I drew on two theories - mediated action theory and activity theory - and the notion that design is a complex and dynamic communicative activity that intertwines people, tools, rules, community and division of labour. I adopted a qualitative methodology and a single instrumental case method across two design teams of higher education language teachers and students involved in a design-for-learning activity. I gathered data from audio and video recordings of a design-for-learning activity, sketches generated during the design-for-learning activity, and semi-structured interviews conducted with the teachers after the design workshop. I observed and analysed the interactions produced by these two groups of participants. Interaction analysis, a qualitative microanalytical method, was used to explore how individuals interacted with each other and the objects in their environment. I also adopted inductive thematic analysis to identify patterns relevant to the use of language, gestures, material tools, and sketching activities. The findings are structured over three chapters. The first chapter reveals that teachers and students marshalled the synergy of language, gestures, and material tools, which assisted and coordinated the collective participation, contribution, sense-making process and shared understanding of the design activity. The second chapter indicates that sketching is an instrument to express (part of) the design by (i) aiding the participants to visualise abstract ideas, (ii) supporting communication and the generation of further ideas and sketches, and (iii) sustaining group sketching. The third chapter identifies five key features of a collaborative design process of a design-for-learning activity: (i) structured, (ii) generative, (iii) self-reliant, (iv) divergent, and (v) involved an unspoken division of labour. This thesis contributes primarily to the research on learning design and participatory design. Creating a sketch helps identify teachers’ and students’ needs as they define the initial characteristics of a tool they may use. This thesis has implications for the design of design workshops and teacher-ready design methods, and it suggests that teachers’ and students’ roles could be expanded to user interface design for learning technologies. The exploratory nature of this study engendered several limitations, including a small sample size of participants I could observe and interview. In addition, the research participants came from the same Australian university, which may have distinct characteristics from other higher education international contexts. Further studies could explore the possible effect(s) of context through comparisons with other universities, which should result in more generalisable findings to inform theory and practice