Revisiting Design-Based Research Approaches to Studying Online Learning

• In Event: Diverse Perspectives on Improving Online Learning Theory, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Purpose
In this theoretical/methodological paper, we discuss how both research and design can produce empirical knowledge in independent ways and examine arrangements that permit researchers to simultaneously invent and study online learning environments. We revisit the methods and epistemology that undergirds the design-based research (DBR) paradigm and discuss how they produce different types of knowledge. Ultimately, we aim to provoke a reflection among our potential audience of researchers and instructional designers about how DBR is positioned to address the challenges of balancing educational and psychological research goals with design efforts to achieve actionable information about online learning environments.

Perspectives
DBR is a thirty-year old tradition which has been taken up in different domains as a way to study interventions that challenge the relationship between research and design (Hoadley & Campos, in press). DBR attempts to understand the world by trying to change it, making it an interventionist research method. However, DBR methods problematize the designed nature of interventions, recognizing that the intended design is different from what may be enacted in a complex social context: one in which both participants and researchers have agency (Tabak, 2004). This problematization in DBR aligns with Dewey's (1890) pragmatism, in which the knowledge we seek is actionable.

Methods and Data Sources
To revisit design-based research approaches and apply them to online learning in this paper, we reviewed relevant previous literature related to DBR — from its antecedents to connected methodological approaches — and how it relates to studying online learning. Most importantly, we reviewed and summarized the most recent scholarly work around these topics to reframe a DBR process model, introducing a major reorganization of the types of knowledge DBR produces.

Results
Our revised process model (below) attempts to show how DBR engages with and produces knowledge within four main categories of activity: grounding, conjecturing, iterating, and reflecting. Within the context of online learning, the reframing of design-based research methods helps address some of the challenges associated with more traditional applied science paradigms, including methodological alignment, sensitivity to dynamic contexts, tentative generalization, and turning insights into designed interventions. Each of the four categories of activity involves producing types of knowledge that sit between the particular and the general in ways that support further exploration both in research and design of online learning.

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Significance
The DBR methodology make it a propitious approach for developing and studying online learning environments. Researchers in online learning often struggle with what aspects of their findings are generalizable or bound to a particular time, place, or community. Because DBR can support contextualized and interventionist grounding, conjecturing, iterating, and reflecting, it is well suited to the ways scholars need to coordinate design-centric knowledge with psychological theories and claims.

Authors

• Christopher Hoadley, University at Buffalo - SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Fabio Campos, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author