Susan McKenney (University of Twente)

For decades, technologies have been evolving extremely rapidly, as have human orientations toward them. It is therefore not surprising that attention gravitates toward that which is moving so quickly. But doing so often comes at the cost of focusing on persistent yet pertinent challenges in higher education, such as hidden inequities, poor learner motivation, insufficient time-for-task, large class sizes, or inadequate self-regulation skills. Many such challenges are daunting, even wicked, i.e. difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are hard to recognize and are socially complex, for example because efforts to solve one aspect of the problem reveal or create new problems. The result is that we currently witness an abundance of scholarship foregrounding new technologies, their affordances, and their limitations, alongside too few studies that foreground the wicked problems plauging students, teachers, learning designers, educational developers, and other academics. While we do need to understand the characteristics of high quality teaching and learning technologies (as this information can help make a difference in practice), such knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for rendering effective, efficient, and meaningful teaching and learning in higher education. What also matters is how we develop and use that understanding to solve wicked problems. In other words, we must learn how to solve our practical challenges through the design and refinement of solutions.

This keynote describes a robust way to do exactly that: Educational design research is a genre of study in which the iterative development of solutions to practical and complex educational problems provides the setting for scientific inquiry. The solutions can be educational products, processes, programs or policies. Educational design research not only targets solving significant problems facing educational practitioners, but at the same time it seeks to discover new knowledge that can inform the work of others facing similar struggles. Working systematically and simultaneously toward these dual goals is perhaps the most defining feature of educational design research. The process typically ensues in multiple iterations of analysis and exploration, design and construction, and evaluation and reflection. When structured well, insights from each phase are valuable in their own right, and also contribute to the overall goals of the study. This presentation clarifies the nature of educational design research by briefly describing its origins before elaborating on its characteristics and sharing multiple examples of its application when addressing wicked problems though the development of technological interventions to serve teaching and learning in higher education.