The paper reports on a case study where four groups of lower secondary school students participated in a workshop and undertook the demanding role of designers of Internet of Things applications. In doing that, they made use of a dedicated inventor toolkit, which facilitated students' creative solutions to problems that can appear in the context of a smart city. From a pedagogical point of view, the workshop format is in line with the experiential learning approach. The paper presents a holistic student assessment methodology for this nice domain. In particular, to analyse the impact of the workshop for the students we used four different approaches: artefacts analysis of students' design solutions, classroom observations, a post-test and a survey. The results indicate that the intervention has promoted an effective teaching methodology for the basic conceptual and design aspects of the IoT for these lower secondary school students, but it hasn't addressed equally effectively the attitude-related aspects. Nonetheless, the participant students perceived the intervention as very satisfactory in terms of the IoT concept knowledge, smart cities learning, and problem-solving skills acquired, as well as in terms of enjoyment. The paper concludes on the learning gains of the intervention and discusses the motivation aspect for the teacher as well as for the students in this highly innovative learning experience.
As the integration of digital technologies in higher education continues to increase, there is a need to understand how to best support university teachers as designers of technology‐enhanced learning (TEL) in order to support students to achieve academic success. In this study, we have examined the Faculty Pedagogical Developer Initiative at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, an innovative project to support a bottom‐up change process of teachers as designers of TEL, with the intent to strengthen the professional pedagogical development for the faculty. Data were collected from interviews and official documents. Actor–network theory was applied for the analysis. The results suggest that the initiative stimulated both practical implementation of digital technology in educational programmes and also spurred a debate about teachers as designers of TEL between these pedagogical developers and other teachers across different schools and subjects at KTH. However, there are important social, organisational and technical challenges that should be considered when developing support for university teachers as designers of TEL. This paper concludes that this process requires a deep understanding of four interrelated elements: information, technology, organisation and social arrangements.
Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic
Faculty interest in applying technology in innovative ways has evolved.
Teachers are rarely involved as participatory designers in the TEL contexts.
Collaboration among teachers in the TEL design process is an effective strategy.
What this paper adds
It uncovers dynamics of the bottom‐up change approach of university teachers as designers of TEL interventions.
An insight into how the available technology plays a part in transforming teachers’ practices.
Deeper knowledge about the usefulness of actor‐network theory in empirical HE research.
Implications for practice and/or policy
There is a need for a critical perspective on supporting university teachers as designers of TEL.
Bottom‐up approaches to the faculty pedagogical development in TEL should be continuously supported from the top.
Bottom‐up initiatives should be driven by teachers who are recognised for their teacher excellence and trusted among the faculty.
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