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Bollen, L., van der Meij, H., Leemkuil, H. and McKenney, S. (2015). In search of design principles for developing digital learning and performance support for a student design task. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 31(5), 500-520.
I found this paper by searching for papers on the Twente Educational Model (TEM, or TOM in Dutch). The paper is one of the articles in a special issue on educational design research (EDR), specifically one of the articles located in the early stages of EDR. The context of the paper is on the design and use of a digital environment for second year psychology students within which the students could themselves design a learning environment as a project within the module they were enrolled in. That makes this paper something of a design turducken, given that the design of the environment was itself then studied as EDR.
The authors provide a substantial amount of detail on the methodology guiding their creation of the digital environment, that of Learning by Design (LBD) and also provide detail on what the environment looked like and how the students used it. I shall not summarise that here. (Can we take it as given that ethical approval was sought and granted for the quite intrusive mining and subsequent publication of student access data?) There are others characteristics of this paper that interest me more, that is, design research and TOM.
Every teacher tries things in class to see if they help the students learn. What makes any such intervention stand out and be labelled “educational design research”? Does the intervention have to be built on theory whose printed publication the teacher can hold in her hand, or can it be based on years of experience and intuition? If the intervention is only tried once does that make it not EDR, but if you go back and try again, does that iteration make it EDR? Is it only EDR if it gets published? Is it only EDR if it makes an impact on the theoretical landscape? The authors say “This [design and construction] phase involves rational, purposeful consideration of knowledge and concepts that can be used to address specific problems in practice. As potential solutions are generated and explored, the underlying theoretical and practical rationales are elaborated. This allows the design framework to be evaluated and critiqued.” (p. 500) This definition or description suggests that any thoughtful teaching intervention can be described as EDR. The definition given in the editorial of this special issue “EDR is an intervention and process-oriented approach that uses a variety of methods to examine the development and implementation of instructional solutions to current educational problems” (p. i) also suggests that thoughtful teaching intervention can all be defined as EDR. I struggle with this idea. I’ll need to read more about it as this is not a topic with which I have much familiarity, but it seems to me that it only really starts to earn the name of “design research” if there have been iterations and refinements. In which case the first instance of any intervention only retroactively can be framed as a first stage in EDR – when it first happens it is just a teaching intervention like any other. I admit, this is not something I fully understand. I am cautious of slapping fancy labels on things which don’t deserve them, but we shouldn’t be research snobs and fail to see the worth in what amounts to everyday research in the real classroom. Anyway, food for thought and I should come back to this.
It is 2018 and I am new to UT. The Twente Educational Model (TEM) is the flagship pedagogical model at UT which many people are working hard to make a success. It is a forward thinking educational model for a university trying to educate its students for an unknown, technological, global, entrepreneurial future. Part of my role here will be to see what is working and what is not and how we can be better educators of ours students in this rapidly changing world. The paper I am talking about here was published in 2015, probably about data gathered in 2014, so still very early in TEM’s existence. (September 2013 is when it was rolled out, I believe?) The authors describe TEM in terms familiar today, but then they refer to their own particular context as TEM, that is the digital environment they designed (in Moodle) for their psychology students to use. e.g. “data logs that were recorded in TOM” (p. 509) or “accessing TOM through a VPN connection” (p. 501) . Either I do not understand how the term “TOM” (or TEM) is to be used or the way it is used has changed over the last few years; I suspect the latter. So, while the paper emerges in a literature search for papers on TEM, TEM actually features very little in the paper in its 2018 meaning. That being said, there were some intriguing snippets, for example “[r]ecently, the Board of Directors of the university gave the stimulus for an important renovation of the curriculum for the bachelor programs in all faculties. This led to a uniform roster that better facilitated students to choose from the courses offered throughout the university.”(p. 500). I am interested in the tension of providing mathematics courses which need to be the same every time they are taught in every context so that they can form part of this “uniform roster” yet can still blend into each engineering or science or medical module in order to be part of the TOM ideal of courses clustered around projects. I have not yet been here long enough to see how successful this identity split is working, but I intend to find out!
I found that this paper gave me a lot to think about although not about its central topic, more about the educational design research framework and the local university context and discourse.
Do not treat this blog entry as a replacement for reading the paper. This blog post represents the understanding and opinions of Torquetum only and could contain errors, misunderstandings or subjective views.
I found this paper by searching for papers on the Twente Educational Model (TEM, or TOM in Dutch). The paper is one of the articles in a special issue on educational design research (EDR), specifically one of the articles located in the early stages of EDR. The context of the paper is on the design and use of a digital environment for second year psychology students within which the students could themselves design a learning environment as a project within the module they were enrolled in. That makes this paper something of a design turducken, given that the design of the environment was itself then studied as EDR.
The authors provide a substantial amount of detail on the methodology guiding their creation of the digital environment, that of Learning by Design (LBD) and also provide detail on what the environment looked like and how the students used it. I shall not summarise that here. (Can we take it as given that ethical approval was sought and granted for the quite intrusive mining and subsequent publication of student access data?) There are others characteristics of this paper that interest me more, that is, design research and TOM.
Every teacher tries things in class to see if they help the students learn. What makes any such intervention stand out and be labelled “educational design research”? Does the intervention have to be built on theory whose printed publication the teacher can hold in her hand, or can it be based on years of experience and intuition? If the intervention is only tried once does that make it not EDR, but if you go back and try again, does that iteration make it EDR? Is it only EDR if it gets published? Is it only EDR if it makes an impact on the theoretical landscape? The authors say “This [design and construction] phase involves rational, purposeful consideration of knowledge and concepts that can be used to address specific problems in practice. As potential solutions are generated and explored, the underlying theoretical and practical rationales are elaborated. This allows the design framework to be evaluated and critiqued.” (p. 500) This definition or description suggests that any thoughtful teaching intervention can be described as EDR. The definition given in the editorial of this special issue “EDR is an intervention and process-oriented approach that uses a variety of methods to examine the development and implementation of instructional solutions to current educational problems” (p. i) also suggests that thoughtful teaching intervention can all be defined as EDR. I struggle with this idea. I’ll need to read more about it as this is not a topic with which I have much familiarity, but it seems to me that it only really starts to earn the name of “design research” if there have been iterations and refinements. In which case the first instance of any intervention only retroactively can be framed as a first stage in EDR – when it first happens it is just a teaching intervention like any other. I admit, this is not something I fully understand. I am cautious of slapping fancy labels on things which don’t deserve them, but we shouldn’t be research snobs and fail to see the worth in what amounts to everyday research in the real classroom. Anyway, food for thought and I should come back to this.
It is 2018 and I am new to UT. The Twente Educational Model (TEM) is the flagship pedagogical model at UT which many people are working hard to make a success. It is a forward thinking educational model for a university trying to educate its students for an unknown, technological, global, entrepreneurial future. Part of my role here will be to see what is working and what is not and how we can be better educators of ours students in this rapidly changing world. The paper I am talking about here was published in 2015, probably about data gathered in 2014, so still very early in TEM’s existence. (September 2013 is when it was rolled out, I believe?) The authors describe TEM in terms familiar today, but then they refer to their own particular context as TEM, that is the digital environment they designed (in Moodle) for their psychology students to use. e.g. “data logs that were recorded in TOM” (p. 509) or “accessing TOM through a VPN connection” (p. 501) . Either I do not understand how the term “TOM” (or TEM) is to be used or the way it is used has changed over the last few years; I suspect the latter. So, while the paper emerges in a literature search for papers on TEM, TEM actually features very little in the paper in its 2018 meaning. That being said, there were some intriguing snippets, for example “[r]ecently, the Board of Directors of the university gave the stimulus for an important renovation of the curriculum for the bachelor programs in all faculties. This led to a uniform roster that better facilitated students to choose from the courses offered throughout the university.”(p. 500). I am interested in the tension of providing mathematics courses which need to be the same every time they are taught in every context so that they can form part of this “uniform roster” yet can still blend into each engineering or science or medical module in order to be part of the TOM ideal of courses clustered around projects. I have not yet been here long enough to see how successful this identity split is working, but I intend to find out!
I found that this paper gave me a lot to think about although not about its central topic, more about the educational design research framework and the local university context and discourse.
Do not treat this blog entry as a replacement for reading the paper. This blog post represents the understanding and opinions of Torquetum only and could contain errors, misunderstandings or subjective views.
