Abstract:

Digital design and learning in higher education have been addressed in international journals such as: Journal of Information systems education (JISE), Information Systems Educational Journal (ISEJ), Journal of Information Technology Education (JITE) and Computers and education (C&E). Digital design and learning have also been addressed in learning conferences and pedagogical books, such as “Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age”. A vast majority of articles addressing digital design in education have a focus on teaching, curriculum design or present empirical findings from a teaching case. Some articles have a focus on students’ learning, such as “Database design learning (C&E)” or “Enhancing Student Learning across Disciplines: A Case Example … Design Course for MIS and ACS Majors (JITE)”. As a complement to earlier research, the research in this article has students’ reflections on learning during digital design (learning in a practice) as an empirical foundation.
This article presents a teaching case, designed by the authors, in order to explore students’ reflections on learning.

The teaching case is called “Bicycle Workshop (BW)”, where the general idea is that the students design and develop a digital application (Web-app) that runs in a web browser. The aim of the digital application is to support managers and employees at the BW in their business processes at the workshop: managerial, administrative and operational. In the teaching case, the students apply an agile design and development method grounded in the Scandinavian information systems tradition. As a consequence, every student has to take (or play) two roles: designer of the Web-app and user (as an employee at BW) of the Web-app. The teaching case, BW, takes place the first year in an Information Systems undergraduate program.

At the end of BW, every student writes a reflection (maximum of 1500 words) on what they have learned in BW. In the reflection, students have the possibility to highlight important situations during the process of BW as a designer and as an employee. The highlighted situations should also be related to the literature that is used during BW. The collected data is in total, seventy (70) reflections, one each from every student that has been involved in BW. The theoretical framework that has been adopted during analysis of the reflections is Bloom's revised taxonomy (Krathwohl 2002) together with two socio-cognitive concepts: locus of control (Carlson et al. 2007) and self-efficacy (Bandura 1993). Adopting Bloom’s revised taxonomy together with locus of control and self-efficacy gave the researchers the opportunity to understand more about students’ meta-cognitive knowledge and cognitive processes involved in the digital design.

The aim of the research is to discuss students’ meta-cognitive knowledge in relation to digital design practices in educational settings. The research question is: How can students’ reflections on learning in digital design support our understanding of learning-in-practice in higher education? Moreover, the focus in the article is on students’ reflection on learning-in-practice and their meta-cognitive knowledge, from that perspective the intention of the presented research is to expand researchers understanding of digital design in education.

Keywords:

Digital design, Learning-in-practice, Meta-cognitive knowledge, students reflection.