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This thesis is a multilayered approach to understanding the complex processes involved in designing, developing, implementing and evaluating online learning environments for academic writing in discipline contexts. The study is broadly situated in the field of educational design research (EDR). It brings together theories of pedagogical design, including those of multimodality and educational linguistics, with the practical implementation and evaluation of designs in context. From an applied perspective, the research addresses the problem of providing support for students to improve their academic writing, in particular the writing of the laboratory report genre, a key genre in science and engineering disciplines. For teachers and others involved in the design of online teaching and learning, the aim is to provide design principles to support the process of creating effective resources to teach academic writing online. These principles cover all stages of the process from design to evaluation. The thesis comprises three main stages which focus on the processes involved in the development of an online program for supporting students writing a report in Physiology, the Flexible Electronic Report-writing Tool (FLERT). The first focuses on the collaborations of the design team in creating the online learning resources within a ‘communities of practice’ framework. I use discourse analysis, based on the theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), to identify knowledge and relationship building among participants. The second draws on both multimodal social semiotics and SFL to examine how network and screen designs created for laboratory report writing programs in science and engineering have evolved over time. The third uses a multi- and mixed methods approach, together with SFL, to examine two cycles of implementation and evaluation of FLERT to assess how students have transformed their learning through their interactions with the program. The relationships among the outcomes from these three stages provides insights into: • the practice of design for learning; • the meaning making characteristics of the products of design for teaching and learning purposes; • the interactions of student users with the designed products and the influence of design features on student learning; • design principles, both general principles for online learning program design and those, at a more local level, for teaching academic writing online. |
