Design methodologies and research approaches

Design methodologies and research approaches

Researchers in educational technology adopt different stances of what it means to practice academic research. One may initially distinguish a series of levels going from the conceptual to the technical:

1. Fundamental research: Many researchers in the field choose to adopt a more fundamental research stance focusing on small well-defined problems such as “under which conditions can multimedia animations be effective”.
2. Technology-supported instructional design applied to various domains of education; major categories are distance teaching, blended teaching, computer-enhanced classroom teaching, industrial training. Other specializations may concern subject matters (e.g. science or language teaching) or approaches (direct instruction vs. project-oriented learning for example).
3. Research on the design and application of technologies. Researcher may specialize on subjects like the use of computer simulations in education or more technically, how to build authoring and learning environments for simulations.

Some researchers may combine a fundamental research perspective with a particular kind of instructional design and a particular kind of technology. Depending upon these options, research interests and research methodology will not be the same. From the possible combinations there are probably two major strands of thought that can be identified:

• Educational technology as part of the learning sciences. Research is inspired by and contributes to modern learning theory. This strand includes research communities like computer-supported collaborative learning, intelligent tutoring systems, ubiquitous computing.
• Educational technology as instructional technology. It is inspired by and contributes to instructional design theory and methodology. This strand includes research communities on e-learning, distance teaching, multimedia design.

Educational technology can be considered as a design science and as such, it has developed some specific research methodology like “Design-based research”. However, since it addresses also all fundamental issues of learning, teaching and social organization, educational technology makes use of the full range of modern social science and life sciences methodology. Globally speaking, research methodology for educational technology relies on general research methodology, in particular on approaches of the social sciences.

Design-related issues

• Instructional design method
• Design methodology
• The category design methodologies

Research-related issues

• Educational technology research approaches
• The category research methodologies