2020 ICERI

AN INTEGRATED BLENDED LEARNING ECOSYSTEM FOR THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE DESIGN SKILLS OF TEACHERS-TO-BE
M. Pentucci1, C. Laici2
1University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara (ITALY)
2University of Macerata (ITALY)
Abstract
This contribution introduces a device to the learning design that appears as a learning ecosystem,
characterized by the integration of methods, technologic resources of different kind used in BYOD (App
Depit, YouTube, Telegram, Google Drive) mode, and mediator artefacts (the “Box” and the design table).
The device was used during the laboratory called “Theories and methods for the school learning design
and assessment”, Academic Year 2019-2020, at the University of Macerata, tested on the 230 students
attending the Degree Course in Primary Educational Sciences, organised in 5 small groups, each one
coordinated by a tutor. The device gave the pre-service training students the possibility of experimenting
how the learning design can be considered as a recursive process between prediction, action, regulation
and reflection [1]. The support methodology used, which made use of the different technologic
resources, reflects the three phases used by Jonassen [2] of the modelling, coaching, scaffolding. They
enabled an accompaniment performed according the logic of fading, so that the students became more
and more autonomous and aware. The mediator artefacts that supported the students in their design
path were a narrative table to tell and reflect on the designed lesson and the Box/cube as a descriptive
tool metaphorizing the process of plunging and distancing towards the designed action and whose sides
display the necessary elements to design and to reflect of what is designed. From a first analysis of the
data one can suppose how the integrated learning ecosystem that was used, enabled the students to
start the development of a reflexive attitude towards the recursive and cyclic dimension of the design.
Keywords: Learning Design, Teachers' Professionalisation, Blended Learning Ecosystem, BYOD.
1 INTRODUCTION
Among the competences to be implemented in the pre-service training curriculum for the teachers-to-
be, the one concerning the learning design is a key-point. Perrenoud [3] began his list of skills for
teaching with the need of organising the learning-teaching paths through the creation and the design of
devices and didactic sequences starting from experiences and the real representations of the students.
A situated design therefore necessary to orientate the student as well as to reify the teacher’s
predictions, open enough to support the student even in the inevitable moments of regulation in action
[4].
In the last ten years the Learning Design has shaped up as a base for teaching, with several and different
goals: it proposes models to anticipate and organize the learning-teaching process, in order to support
practice, to improve it in an ongoing and recursive way, drawing also from experience, that is from
epistemology, borne by the practice itself. At the same time, it increases the alignment between teacher
and student [5] proposing visible and shared paths, oriented for all the individuals involved in the didactic
field. Finally, it urges the sharing and the cooperation, as it poses itself as a professional skill becoming
heritage of the teaching community [1].
The design is therefore an answer to the complexity the teacher meets along his/her educating
experience: the setting of a simplex mechanism, which could give sense to the choices and to the
decisions [6] to undertake to manage the current didactic situations.
Such skill has, therefore, been undertaken since the pre-service training of the teachers, activating
strategies and learning environments that are useful for a double goal: proposing models and guide
tools guaranteeing a suitable scaffolding when testing the practice; developing, thanks to the modelling
and coaching provided by the teacher-trainer, an ongoing reflectiveness on practices, primary
requirement for the professional teacher. The reflection in-action and on-action is in fact an attitude
enabling to face the design expertise not only as a moment anticipating and preceding the action, but
to accustom the teacher-to-be to activate a recursive cycle between designing, action and regulation
useful to improve the learning process and put it more and more in the context.
Proceedings of ICERI2020 Conference
9th-10th November 2020
ISBN: 978-84-09-24232-0
2145

This contribution aims at describing an experience, carried out along a laboratory of Theories and
methods for the school learning design and assessment
1
with 230 students attending the third year,
organized in 5 small groups, each one coordinated by a tutor, during which an educational ecosystem
was set up [7] putting a device at the students’ disposal for the designing, the reflection and the testing
of the classroom practice. The tools used, aimed at guiding the student in an ongoing process of
plunging and distancing with reference to the practice, enabled to introduce him to the acquisition of a
design expertise of a reflective kind, documented by the produced artefacts and by the conversations
of clarification carried out with the students. For this reason, it is possible to suppose the testing of the
design tool in other contexts, in particular in the in-service training of the teachers.
1.1 Design for learning in complexity
The design practice realised in school environments has along the time moved away from the classic
idea of a process designing an experience able to reach fixed goals starting from the educational needs
supposed according to the teacher’s experience or determined by a preventive diagnostic analysis of
the context. Nowadays designing and action are strongly integrated moments [8] and the teacher who
designs has basically two tasks: continuously modulating the training path that at the beginning is only
structured in its founding nuclei; redefining, along the work, the educational objectives of the different
phases of the path, but mainly rethinking and restructuring the mediation and the didactic mediators,
useful from time to time to face the situations that come along during the action [9]. The design is
therefore a reflective action that «determines learning trajectories able to go together with and to support
the students’ involvement in a system of activities intentionally predisposed» [10 p. 110]. The
professional reflective teacher [11] must think about and propose some paths that enable the students
to face unknown situations and link both formal and informal contexts, characterized by complexity: a
complexity of knowledge, built no longer uniformly and pre-determined but upgraded starting from
several fragments and single experiences making it meaningful [12]; complexity of the didactic
situations, where the students bring out some issues, languages, identities that are multiple and
variegated; complexity of the role of the teacher, who on one side must rule and manage such
complexity, and on the other make it intelligible and governable by his/her students.
For this the design has, among the other objectives, the one of reducing complexity through obliging
functions [13], functions that can be assumed by artefacts, tools and aggregating devices able to lead
and support this process in a simplex form [14]. If designing means anticipating needs and reactions in
a complex environment, gaining knowledge today means learning to make predictions towards the
imagined or supposed experiences according to others similar experiences [15], therefore the teacher
must favour that way of learning predisposing substitutionary mediators facilitating the device of
prediction.
Therefore, teaching today can be defined as science of the design [1] requiring an ongoing reflective
practice and an attitude by the teacher, who, as Collins [16] underlines, when experimenting design
practices faces chaotic situations, has to be flexible towards the revision of the project, has to compare
with others involved in the process (students and colleagues), must proceed on hypothesis, trials and
to confront with inevitable mistakes.
An essential element of the current Learning Design is undoubtedly granularity. In fact, it is necessary
to go on through different dimensions, macro and micro, dialoguing between them but having different
logics. In fact, differently from the past, in which according to the logic of collection or the metaphor of
the chain a whole of blocks tied among them built the global path, nowadays macro-designing is the
sense of the path, the background that orientates ad directs, while micro-designing looks at the
organisation of fragments in autonomous sessions, having their own self-conclusive meaning, but also
dialoguing with the global sense of the teaching/learning process. The two levels mutually influence one
another, the one modifies, amplifies and renovates the sense of the other [17].
Micro-design is the way through which the teacher organises and makes the issue and the experience
brought along buy the student meaningful, predisposing tasks and activities that can involve him/her
from an interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive point of view [18]. It is the core matter of the process
today, as its micro dimension makes it flexible and suitable to contexts and situations in short times,
making it sometimes simultaneous in comparison to the action. It is also a core-level professional skill:
in facts it requires an ongoing functional reflection not only to build the work session, but also to re-
1
Degree course in “Primary Teacher Training” at University of Macerata (Italy), Full Professor: Pier Giuseppe Rossi.
2146

upgrade it continuously identifying and promoting the elements of effectiveness and transformation it
determines along the didactic path [19], without losing sight of the global sense of the path.
It is therefore necessary, in the training of teachers-to-be, to provide suitable epistemological tools both
to face the above-mentioned complexity, and to arrange design reflective tools anticipating a scaffolding
integrated in the device itself [20]. They represent a guide for the design, but also an artefact that
stimulates the mechanism of plunging and distancing from the practice, therefore making the
microteaching [21] experiences, which are habitual in the pre-service training, true laboratories for
experimenting not only practices, but most of all attitudes, approaches and reflectivity in action and post-
action.
1.2 The integrated blended learning ecosystem
In this complex and multi-faceted scenario, recalled and required by the Learning Design, foreseeing
the possibility of setting up a digital integrated ecosystem can be meaningful. It can be both container
and contained and it can welcome and enable such complexity at different levels and with different tools,
times, roles and resources, in a blended view.
The digital educational ecosystem in fact can be considered as an adaptive socio-technical system
made up of digital “species” (such as tools, services, digital resources) and by communities of social
agents (such as students, teachers, technicians) mutually interacting [22, 7].
That learning environment, recalling the renowned concept of ecosystem by Bronfenbrenner [23],
thanks to the possibilities opened by the digital, can even better implement some features and
functionalities characterising it as ecosystem, that is to say a system that is not fixed and static, but in
an ongoing evolution, dynamic and hybrid. Such digital educational ecosystem is in fact characterized
by the constant interaction between the parties that create it. The fundamental functionalities are among
these. They enable the bidirectional interactions between students and teachers (but also among
students) that can happen either in real time or in an asynchronous way and that can make use of
different tools going from formal (forum inside institutional Content Management System) to informal
(social tools such as social networks or chats), but can also make use of formal learning elements, such
as short videos that may need different sharing platforms (for example Google Drive, YouTube or CMS)
[22] and many other mediator artefacts suitably designed to support the specific learning path.
Therefore it is a flexible environment aggregating different types of tools and resources [24], either
explicitly thought for the training and of an informal or generalist kind, which at the beginning weren’t
thought for educational contexts, but that are intentionally bended and re-thought to answer educational
and interaction needs between teacher-tutor and students.
Such educational ecosystem in addition integrates what is digital in an innovative way, by widening the
same idea of blended learning that is no longer seen as a simple “horizontal” blended that is as an
alternation of interactions and activities that can be carried out both face-to-face and online, but it also
promotes a “vertical” type of blended where the digital enters the classroom and the face-to-face
educational places to open new spaces and new times (for activities, confrontations, sharing) going on
also outside the space and the time of the lesson.
The expansion of the concept of blended also links to the use by the students of their personal device
(Smartphone, tablet, laptop) according to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) logic that enables not only
the access in real time to the different resources put at disposal by the teacher-tutors or by the
colleagues, but also the students’ active participation to the activities and to the interactions proposed
and most of all it gives the possibility of working in an interactive way receiving immediate and recursive
feedbacks. Those feedbacks, offered inside a digital training ecosystem, can promote dialogical
attitudes and enable an alignment between the teacher’s goals and the students’ ones, an ongoing re-
designing and co-designing, both of the learning ways of the student, and the didactic devices [25].
2 METHODOLOGY
2.1 The organization of the eco system in terms of digital resources and
training methods
In the experience of the “Theories and methods for the school learning design and assessment” an
integrated digital ecosystem was set up to put at the students’ disposal a simplex educational device for
the design, the reflection and the testing in a classroom practice.
2147

That ecosystem, wanted to integrate, in a meaningful and intentionally designed way, methods, digital
resources of different kind used in BYOD (App Depit, YouTube, Telegram, Google Drive), and mediator
artefacts (the “Box” and the design table) thought, in their constant interaction, to support and lead the
design process of teachers-to-be, enabling them to experiment those mechanisms of plunging and
distancing of the practice that enable that reflective attitude, which is necessary for Learning Design.
In addition to mediator artefacts (that we will analyse afterwards), among the integrated digital resources
we decided to use the app called Depit (open app born from a European project led by the University of
Macerata)
2
as a generator of Graphic Organizers shared between students and teachers, able to reify
and support the didactic process in terms of organization, orientation, alignment, coherence between
macro and micro designing [26]. The app enabled to visualize in the classroom the laboratory training
path reified as a digital map (also containing the study materials), but, being available in the students’
personal devices too, contributed to favour the orientation and the alignment between the professor’s
goals and those of the tutors and of the students.
Another digital resource used was a YouTube channel collecting some short videos used as starting
moments to launch the activity and that were made available even before the face-to-face meetings, to
enable students to get to the classroom with questions and hints to start the discussion. The YouTube
channel enabled to share some videos with the students, which represented design models of expert
teachers and other students in the previous years, used in a first work phase of the laboratory.
In addition, a special Google Drive space was used particularly to file and share the students’ designs
along the experience. As they were always available, they were the subject of a recursive and cyclic
feedback by the teacher and the tutors, but also by the colleagues.
Finally, a special Telegram channel was used to enable not only the sharing of some information useful
for the educational path, but also to support a constant dialogic relationship among all the participants
to the laboratory.
The educational device offered the students attending the Laboratory in pre-service training, the
possibility of experimenting how the design has to overcome that setting that considers it as a mere
linear sequence of contents to welcome and test instead the idea of designing meant as a recursive
process between prediction, action, regulation and reflection [1].
Such cycle was reified through a series of design hints that enabled a recursive path of plunging and
distancing as compared to the design practice, aimed at getting a reflective attitude in relation to the
whole didactic cycle that the students had eventually to test in the classroom.
The support methodology used inside the blended digital educational ecosystem got its inspiration from
three sentences used by Jonassen [2], which could be used by the teacher and by the tutor in their
relationship with the student: modelling, coaching and scaffolding.
In the “modelling” phase the teacher shows how to perform a task for example, proposing himself as an
example (behavioural modelling) or, in the case of cognitive modelling, he/she supplies iconic
representations and cognitive artefacts [2].
In this first phase the Laboratory foresaw the use of substitutionary practices with the use of a video
where the students are shown professional situations and contexts [28]. The students were therefore
invited to visualize and analyse two videos of an expert teacher respectively devoted to the design of a
work session and its realization in class, and then, in another meeting, a colleague student from the
previous years. That analysis was supported by a discussion coordinated by the tutors through
“guidance questions” (face-to-face and online through Google forms) and the group filling-in of the two
mediator artefacts (box and table), not only to show how to start the design of a work session - bearing
in mind the cognitive conflict, the bridge, the need of activating the students [1], but most of all, to make
the difference between what is designed and performed come out, focusing therefore on the regulation
in-action and how it is necessary to move between plunging and distancing, to grasp and experiment
this aspect.
In addition, the modelling perspective was used during the discussion for the final exam where some
students agreed to work with the teacher in a plenary session, simulating the exam so that all the
students could be more aware of the expectations and the objectives of the path, but also of the criteria
and the assessment methods that would be used during the exam.
2
The “Depit App” can be downloaded at the following link https://infofactory.it/media/trial/files.html
2148

In the “coaching” phase the teacher accompanies the student while performing his/her activity, working
with him/her, motivating him/her, analysing his/her performances, giving feedbacks, stimulating
reflections of what was done, questioning the used models [2].
According to Jonassen, while modelling is focused mainly on the teacher’s performance and coaching
on the student’s one, the scaffolding phase “is a more systemic approach to supporting the learner,
focusing on the task, the environment, the teacher, and the learner” [2, p. 234]. In the “scaffolding” phase
one favours modelling of the performed path and this phase actually appears as a reflection on-action
that the student develops upon the teacher’s solicitation.
In these coaching and scaffolding phases, which were particularly connected and twisted in the
Laboratory, the students were committed in the designing work of a work session, supported by the two
mediator artefacts: the box and the table. The created design artefacts and the audio recording of the
group designing dynamics underwent a peer feedback by the colleagues and a detailed feedback by
the professor and tutors. In fact, this way the students are supported when facing the production-revision
iterative cycles [1].
Those phases enabled an accompanying performed according to the logic of “fading”, to make the
students more and more aware and autonomous. Each student in fact at the end designed
autonomously a work session to be tested in class during their apprenticeship in the following weeks.
The lesson was video recorded and the design products, together with the recordings, were shared with
the professor and the tutor for the discussion of the final exam.
2.2 The mediator artefacts
The activated pivotal device in the training process is made up of two artefacts, thought and built to
support the plunging and the distancing in comparison to the design practice on one side, to implement
the student’s reflexivity on the other.
The first artefact was defined as BOX (Fig.1) as it is a true box with the shape of a cube, metaphor of
the process the student has to activate when he/she goes towards the design of the work session:
entering the situation (in the box, Fig. 3), plunging therefore in the prediction of the action or better in
the simulated and anticipated action; going out from the situation (out from the box, Fig.2), distancing
from what he/she created, linking it strongly to the context, to analyse it and to reconsider it in a critical
way.
Figure 1. The box/cube and the “reflexive” external perspective
2149