Designing for complex ICT-based learning: understanding teacher thinking to help improve educational design

The work involved in designing good learning tasks is becoming more complex. This is partly because the changing needs of the knowledge society are placing greater demands on the ability of graduates to work with knowledge in more versatile ways. It also arises from the growing complexity of arrangements for learning: involving new and more fluid distributions of learning activity across time and space. Efforts are being made to improve the design resources available to teachers in higher education, yet little is known about how teachers actually engage in design work: what they think about, what experience and expertise they draw upon, what goes on when they create new learning tasks. This paper presents some outcomes of a small scale study of teacher thinking during educational design. It focuses on the teacher design thinking in the context of systems thinking and modelling course. In particular, it explores some ideas about the mental resources that need to be activated and combined in coming to good design decisions – especially when ICT tools are an important part of the educational mix.