Bridging design prototypes (BDPs)

A design tool to research and resource sustainable, equitable, flexible learning

Abstract

For sustainable and equitable education in flexible learning, design of learning resources should start with understanding needs, wants, and context of each member of a classroom community. So, teaching staff and learners can relate or connect to each other in this shared educational experience. Maintaining learners motivated, rigor in the classroom, managing disruption, and retaining diverse learners requires changes in how technology is used, curriculum is designed, and students understood (Bovill & Woolmer, 2019; Porter et al., 2024; Vaughan et al., 2023).

Designing for one-size-fits-all might not bring about meaningful learning and foster connection for students who could be time-starved, reside outside of main centres, studying while working, caretaking or with disabilities. In a face-to-face classroom, teaching staff more often than not tend to adapt, transform, and innovate resources to account for student diversities. The same tendency should be possible in an online classroom. So, the relevance of these resources to learning outcomes are not devalued by students due to a perceived lack of understanding of their circumstances or conditions.

To support digital access and equity, it has been recommended to “include human-centred design [HCD] in the construction of culturally sensitive, accessible, flexible learning” (G. Gomez et al., 2022, p. 27). The bridging design prototype (BDP) approach is a human-centred design method for individual designers or small organisations with incomplete multidisciplinary teams and limited resources. A bridging design prototype is a fully functional rapid prototype built with features familiar to a user community and with novel features that a designer incorporates after careful analysis of relevant data. It capitalises on a user community’s prior knowledge (i.e. the knowledge a user already has about a situation or an activity) and recognises their context realities. These characteristics bring user communities into the development process early while a designer or team employs it for learning about the user community, the context and the practice. Experimentations should not require the presence of designers. By functional, it means all features should operate. But, BDPs are not necessarily minimum viable products, as the digital or tangible materials with which they are built could have a limited lifespan (Gomez et al., 2020).

Informed by concepts drawn from four design methods and one learning theory (figure 1), this approach emerged during my doctoral research and enabled the development of a BDP for preschool concept mapping that teachers would accept to incorporate into real activities with their children. This BDP (also known as the Authoring Kit for Preschool Concept Mapping) helped me (the designer) gain entry to real settings and made it possible to investigate issues in preschool concept mapping from an interaction design perspective (Gomez, 2010). Outside of my own research, early childhood experts have used it to inform their own concept mapping research on metacognitive skills and science education (Cassata-Widera, 2008; Cassata-Widera, 2009) or promote bottom-up adoption of concept maps as a new didactic tool to teach children with speech impairments (Kicken et al., 2016). A critical reflection on the work of Kicken et al. showed that the BDP approach might be useful in autonomous design projects seeking community design, decentring external designer participation, and enabling users (i.e. teaching staff) to become designers of their own interactive applications (Gomez, 2020).

In higher education, this approach has been used to research suitable technology to enhance engagement, feedback, and connection in asynchronous distance education (Gloria Gomez et al., 2022). This technology has enabled health professions (midwifery and ophthalmology) to carry out “co-creation in the curriculum” that is co-design of learning and teaching within and the duration of the course (Bovill & Woolmer, 2019). Student-led assignments can be in the form of asynchronous online journal clubs and wiki projects provide opportunities for students and academic staff (Gomez et al., 2024; Petsoglou & Stoop, 2020). Work placement experience discussion documents promote connectedness and network learners with other learners, and with lecturers and experts (Daellenbach et al., 2022).

To enhance uptake and dissemination of learning resources in an academic institution, BDPs were developed using self-publishing technologies or “non-designer” software: a website and resources for first year students (Gomez & van der Meer, 2010), a teaching profile booklet, and videos for tutoring and demonstrating.

Seeing my colleagues (i.e., primary teachers, speech therapists, and support staff) improving BDPs on their own or replacing them with a completely new prototype made evident to me that this approach could enable teaching staff to design their own novel educational resources with little or no participation from an external designer. Weiner et al. (2020) provide a reason: “everybody who works in education is a designer, though they may be working in different design spaces, each requiring different specificities of expertise, background knowledge, tools, and practices” (p. 781).

The diagram (figure 1) provides a step-by-step guide showing how the BDP principles are organised and interact with each other during the human-centred design process of an educational resource (Gomez, 2023). These six principles could guide/help teaching staff individually or in collaboration to:

• Carry out careful analysis of relevant data to inform resource design.
• Develop resources with features familiar to all members of a classroom community to enhance adoption.
• Determine when novel features should be included as part of a resource design, and plan for extra support if needed.
• Inform feature design based on a good understanding of the prior knowledge and the context realities of students and teachers alike, including those with diverse cognitive, physical, and socio-cultural capabilities.

This approach might be significant to current research in digital learning because teaching staff wanting could use it to innovate their teaching practices (Cook & Cook, 2023; Luongo & Case, 2023; Porter et al., 2024) while they collaborate with their learners to design for “one size does not fit all”. Vaughan et al. (2023, p. 13) have related this phrase to Gordon’s statement that says “the balance between face-to-face learning and online learning differs, depending on the nature of a university, the context in which it sits, and the nature of different subjects and how they are typically taught” (2021, p. 1).