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This paper considers the direct involvement of students in degree programme curricula design, specifically four computer science teacher students designing new curricula for the Faculty of Information Technology of the University of Jyväskylä. They participated in a project to make recommendations for the 2017-2020 master's and bachelor's programme curricula. We examined how these recommendations were implemented in the new curricula and what hindered student voice. The project led to major changes: making basic studies in mathematics optional, adding three new courses, and defining new learning goal descriptions for two master's programmes. Several factors hindered student voice: insufficient perceived expertise, doubts about project significance, negative attitudes towards student involvement, and lack of personal interest. Hence, despite the project leading to considerable changes, the students themselves expressed rather critical attitudes towards student involvement in curriculum design. Consequently, promoting student voice in higher education curricula design is a more tensioned phenomenon than has been discussed in earlier research.

Participatory design is a well-known approach that involves stakeholders in designing technologies and other innovations. In education, participatory design is especially advocated for involving students with special needs. However, less attention has been paid to how participatory design can help in collaborations with teachers. This paper presents a

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Abstract:A classroom with a blackboard and some rows of desks is obsolete in special education. Depending on the needs, some students may need more tactile and inspiring surroundings with various pedagogical accessories while others benefit from a simplified environment without unnecessary stimuli. This understanding is applied to a new Finnish special education school building with open and adaptable learning spaces. We have joined the initiative creation process by developing software support for these new spaces in the form of a learning space management system. Participatory design and value-focused thinking were implemented to elicit the actual values of all the stakeholders involved and transform them into software implementation objectives. This paper reports interesting insights about the elicitation process of the objectives.

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Staying at the front line in learning research is challenging because many fields are rapidly developing. One such field is research on the temporal aspects of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). To obtain an overview of these fields, systematic literature reviews can capture patterns of existing research. However, conducting systematic literature reviews is time-consuming and do not reveal future developments in the field. This study proposes a machine learning method based on topic modelling that takes articles from a systematic literature review on the temporal aspects of CSCL (49 original articles published before 2019) as a starting point to describe the most recent development in this field (52 new articles published between 2019 and 2020). We aimed to explore how to identify new relevant articles in this field and relate the original articles to the new articles. First, we trained the topic model with the Results, Discussion, and Conclusion sections of the original articles, enabling us to correctly identify 74% (n = 17) of new and relevant articles. Second, clusterisation of the original and new articles indicated that the field has advanced in its new and relevant articles because the topics concerning the regulation of learning and collaborative knowledge construction related 26 original articles to 10 new articles. New irrelevant studies typically emerged in clusters that did not include any specific topic with a high topic occurrence. Our method may provide researchers with resources to follow the patterns in their fields instead of conducting repetitive systematic literature reviews.