Exploring teachers' perceptions on different CSCL script editing tools

Abstract

Despite the apparent maturity of the learning design field, and the variety of tooling available to support it, adoption among the teacher community (one of its alleged main targets) is still low. There is a lack of research on teachers' perception and use of different technological learning design tools, as existing evaluations are often restricted to a single tool. In order to explore whether there are common factors hampering teacher adoption, and which tool features might appeal to different teachers, more studies involving multiple authoring tools are needed. This paper provides a first step in this direction, describing a mixed methods study performed around a professional development workshop with 18 university teachers from multiple disciplines. This workshop exposed teachers to two different authoring tools (WebCollage and EDIT2), as they learned to create computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) designs and implement them. The findings of our interpretive study (which included questionnaires, observations, or group discussion recordings) support the idea that there is no single tool or set of features that are globally perceived as better, although our evidence also highlights certain factors as important for participant teachers - amongst others, the integration of learning designs with the ICT platforms for enactment, as well as with other tools that they already use in their everyday practice. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.