Student-generated design principles for transforming an educational technology module

Abstract

This paper reports on research where student reflections were used to derive design principles for the transformation of an undergraduate module to better address issues around the use of educational technologies in teaching and learning. The emphasis of this paper is on the derivation of design principles from student reflections after participating in authentic, collaborative, tool-mediated activities. Students’ reflective reports were analysed for their content using simple coding techniques leading to the identification of themes and the derivation of design principles. Findings show that learning activities grounded in a defined theoretical framework markedly improved the depth of student understanding of issues related to teaching and learning with technology. The authentic nature of the activities also contributed to the depth of student reflections which ultimately led to meaningful design principles based entirely on the experiences of students