Student-created digital learning objects (SC-DLOs): Transformative, design-for-learning practices for 21st century e-learning ecologies

Abstract

There is growing impetus, in New Zealand and internationally, to promote transformative uses of digital technologies for learning. However, across-countries research indicates the promise of digital innovation, for tackling enduring educational challenges, is underwhelming. Investigations of research-based approaches into transformative digital learning practices are associated with the notion of affordances as action possibilities and development of students’ 21st century skills. In 1:1 initiatives (one device to one student), teacher design for learning that capitalizes on affordances such as ubiquitous access, increased student agency, engagement, collaboration and creativity, holds some of the potential for realizing transformational promise. One such approach is student creation of digital learning objects (SC-DLOs). Since the inception of Web 2.0 and user-generated content for the internet, digital learning objects (DLOs) have emerged as a phenomenon of increasing interest for delivering instructional content using multimedia. The student-created form is a largely under-theorized and under-investigated practice. This doctoral project incorporated four phases, three of which are represented by articles of empirical research submitted to international journals. The first is an exploratory systematic literature review, which employed mixed methods to examine 59 (of 419 studies) to determine the 21st century skills affordances of SC-DLOs. The second and third articles draw from a cross-subject, SC-DLO corpus (n=519) collected from online blog sites of 108 students from 30 classrooms and 18 schools. The SC-DLOs were created by Year 7-8 primary school students (aged 11-13) in a 1:1 digital initiative. The initiative incorporates clusters of schools across the North and South Islands of New Zealand serving mainly Māori and Pasifika communities. A Grounded Theory (GT) methodology was employed to systematically describe and draw comparisons between features of cross-curricula, and mathematics SC-DLOs (the largest subset of the corpus). Findings from the three studies collectively informed a framework of student design support, a visual model to promote teacher awareness of ecological, e-learning dependencies and a future prototype of a digital application. This thesis contributes to understandings of student design for learning towards an emerging theory of SC-DLOs, implications for transformative digital practices and DLO research more generally.