Abstract:

The need for designing Learning Environments (LEs) through Participatory Design (PD) approaches involving various stakeholders has recently attracted the interest of the research. PD concerns the direct involvement of multidisciplinary groups of stakeholders in the co-design of products (e.g. curriculum or a LE) they use. Additionally, many benefits have been reported in the literature from stakeholders’ involvement in PD such as achieving better personalization and adjustment of the product to stakeholders’ needs, avoiding inaccurate assumptions about their needs, increasing the learning effectiveness and satisfaction from the product as well as decreasing the abandonment of the product. Although PD models are suggesting how PD should be implemented for specific disciplines (e.g., architecture design), or from which sectors the stakeholders could stem from (e.g., education, health, social protection), there is lack of evidence indicating which categories of stakeholders should be invited in PD approaches of LEs. Additionally, their role and responsibilities during the PD approach are various and often in bewilderment. The current study employed a systematic literature review approach in order to identify and summarize the categories of stakeholders involved in PD of LEs (i.e. ‘who’) as well as their roles and responsibilities during their involvement (i.e. ‘how’). The review was conducted using Scopus, Eric, ScienceDirect, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. It was limited until December of 2019 and ended up with approximately 1161 records. After establishing additional exclusion criteria, we considered 26 articles with 33 case studies for the review. An inductive content analysis was employed, and results revealed fourteen categories of stakeholders usually involved in PD of a LE, with most prominent being the categories of experts, students and teachers. Further, four higher-order categories describing the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders during the PD of a LE emerged such as:
(i) Needs and Requirements Analysis,
(ii) Concept,
(iii) Prototyping and
(iv) Final Output, including more specific tasks and activities such as design, evaluation, testing, piloting and refinement.

The current systematic literature review underlines the lack of a framework defining the groups of stakeholders that could be involved in a PD of a LE also identifying their role and responsibilities.

Keywords:

Stakeholders, Participatory design, Learning environment.