Experiments in Teaching Educational Design

Two courses, eight weeks…three educational iPad apps. This is the mission that students in an experimental cross-disciplinary collaboration that I was part of this summer accepted as they took on the dual challenges of producing original research and building it into educational resources. It was my first time working on a project that required such close work between students from two different disciplines, and I learned a lot from our successes and challenges along the way.

I taught a course on “Interactive Educational Design” for students with a background in digital design–the teams responsible for building these apps. My colleague and partner in the project, Dr. Elizabeth Nix, is the director of the University of Baltimore’s Community Studies and Civic Engagement program. She offered a course on “Creative Uses of the Past” to engage her students in original research studying three different artists who make use of history and culture in innovative ways. While my students studied the history and principles of educational design across different media, the history students interviewed artists, visited studios, and connected the work they were studying to historical concepts. Once they reported back with their research, my student teams started building apps in consultation with the “content experts.”

As the very notion of the digital humanities already embraces, collaborations between researchers and producers of digital experiences can be invaluable in changing how we communicate and relate to ideas. Many of us will fill multiple “roles” over the course of our own work, whether through creating digital resources to accompany a course or finding new ways to share our research, and introducing our students to these modes early is an opportunity to bridge the perceived discipline versus “production” gap.

Part of the inspiration for this experiment was a device that many of us at ProfHacker already love: the iPad. There are some beautiful examples of educational apps already developed for tablets, including the New York Public Library’s Biblion, Star Walk, and a number of enhanced books from interactive textbooks to annotated literary editions. The iPad is already making its way into more classrooms, as universities like Seton Hill have given them to all incoming students, and Apple has partnered with Teach for America to solicit donated iPads for use in schools involved in the program. The iPad and other tablets are exciting now because they are new: we’re just beginning to think of ways to make mobile learning experiences engaging. At conferences on digital media and learning, these devices are becoming a focus: the upcoming Mobility Shifts conference at the New School promises to address a number of possibilities for these devices in and out of classroom learning environments.

Despite these early steps, mobile devices are still relatively uncharted territory for educational design, which was part of the excitement of building in this space. However, developing for the iPad is far from easy. I decided to use Adobe Dreamweaver CS 5.5, which just integrated an open source project called PhoneGap that makes it easier to take code developed for the web and transform it to native apps. But there’s still a stiff learning curve to building an app. Frameworks like Wink and Laker offer templates for building eBook-like applications that can be invaluable for rapid development.

Trying something like this for the first time is difficult, and we ran into a number of challenges: the courses had to be scheduled at different times to accommodate students, so not everyone could be involved in the larger conversations. Our purchase of iPads unfortunately corresponded with the iPad 2 launch, so the devices themselves didn’t arrive until a few weeks past when the course had already started. Depending on new technology is definitely a trade of reliability for novelty and the excitement of working on the cutting edge.

The above screenshots are from the “A Duke in Queens” prototype created by Erin Cahill, Michelle Chin, Eric Church and Margo Kabel. They were one of three teams working with research from the team of Dr. Nix’s students researching the work of Duke Riley. (We licensed content from the three artists involved as part of an internal technology grant funding the project, which also helped us get a few iPads to work from–if these sorts of programs are available at your university, they can be a great way to jumpstart this sort of project.) With luck, the three projects will be submitted to Apple for review soon.

Have you experimented with collaborative pedagogy bringing students from multiple disciplines together on a larger project? Does the iPad (or its many kin) interest you as a venue for sharing research, or are you already building and using any great educational apps? Let us know in the comments!