Abstract:

Higher education is moving into unknown disruptive landscapes in a world where new technologies are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries. It affects how we interact and collaborate, and work together to solve complex problems.

Universities invest in digital infrastructures and experiment with various digital tools to cope with the digital transformation toward various learning spaces. However, in retrospect, hybrid and online education delivery has many artifacts influencing the student learning experience, especially regarding student collaboration and interaction.

In the project Learning Through Innovative Collaboration Enhanced by Educational Technology (iLikeIT2) the consortium investigates to what extent Ed.Tech can enhance the learning outcome from collaborative work using specially designed software. This article provides some insight into the project but mainly focuses on a vital part; the theoretical framework for implementing Ed.Tech in collaborative work.

In this article we briefly introduce a theoretical framework and identify the main challenges connected to:
1) the importance of audio-visual solutions and
2) how to enhance student interaction via digital tools.

We explain the reasoning behind a possible design and anchor the pedagogical strategy in theories of learning spaces and previous research in the project. Finally, we use document analysis to establish a framework for training, instructions and requirements for building software that emphasizes the challenges and the collaboration between programmers, instructors and end-users.

The results are based on a pedagogical strategy/design consisting of elements from desk-top research, instructor training results, and interpretation of the previous results and findings in the iLikeIT2-project. The research aim for the project is to identify a set of recommendations for implementing Ed.Tech in collaborative work and how to mitigate difficulties with different learning spaces. This article presents solutions for utilizing strengths in these different learning scenarios.

Keywords:

Ed.Tech, learning spaces, software development, pedagogical strategy, didactical approaches.