Human-centred design to empower "teachers as designers"

Educators of all sectors are learning designers, often unwittingly. To succeed as designers, they need to adopt a design mindset and acquire the skills needed to address the design challenges they encounter in their everyday practice. Human-centred design (HCD) provides professional designers with the methods needed to address complex problems. It emphasizes the human perspective throughout the design lifecycle and provides a practice-oriented approach, which naturally fits educators' realities. This research reports the experiences of educators who used HCD to design ICT-based learning activities. A mixed-methods approach was used to gauge how participating educators experienced the design tasks. The perceived level of difficulty and value of the various methods varied, revealing significant differences between educators according to their level of knowledge of pedagogy frameworks. We discuss our findings from the vantage point of educators' pedagogical beliefs and how experience shapes these. The results support the idea that HCD is a valuable framework for educators, one that may inform ongoing international efforts to shape a science and practice of learning design for teaching.