Participative Learning Experience Design Through Group Concept Mapping

Although there has been an increasing amount of literature on learning experience design in the past five years, it is not clear yet how to operationally integrate the process and methods of instructional design, learning design, user-experience design, design-based research and design thinking in a multi-step participative design process involving stakeholders with different perspectives. Our recent systematic literature review on relationships between learning design and learning analytics applying a critical interpretive synthesis and text analytics identified two issues rarely explicitly discussed in the literature: “evidence-informed instructional design approaches” and “design-based research.” Elaborating on these two concepts, we proposed that evidence-based practice promoted within the learning design paradigm and the need for applying research-based findings advanced in the instructional design field should be complementary to each other in a participatory learning experience design process built upon the tradition of design-based research and recent development of software engineering design and Design Thinking. Against this background, the position paper addresses the following research question: How can we facilitate the participative technology-enhanced learning design in an effective, efficient and appealing way? To this end, the paper introduces Group Concept Mapping (GCM), a mix-methods research methodology. GCM is a consensus-driven approach combining qualitative data collection with advanced statistical techniques to aggregate participants’ contributions and show their collective perspectives.