ABSTRACT
Several strands of Learning Sciences research have conceptualized teaching as a design activity and examined resulting instructional entailments. For example, research has shown that participating in teaching as a design process can help teachers learn new content and skills, enhance their students’ learning, while also serve to support and sustain curricular innovations.
With the emergence of networked technologies to support learning, new questions about how to frame teaching as a design activity are again at the forefront. Within this realm, one important innovation is open educational resources (Oer) –freely available and customizable online teaching and learning resources. With their rapidly growing availability, teachers are increasingly turning to Oer to design instructional experiences for their students. This chapter explores the role technology can play in supporting teachers as they use, adapt, customize, and share Oer to design instructional experiences for their students. It first describes conceptual frameworks informing the teaching as design research agenda: pedagogical design capacity, peer production, and use diffusion. Then, two technology models are presented that support these processes and we describe their implementation in two software tools, the Instructional Architect and the Curriculum Customization Service. While the two tools occupy different parts of the design space, they aim to support teachers through leveraging peer production processes around teachers’ varying levels of pedagogical design capacity. The chapter summarizes findings from studies of teacher use of these two tools and concludes by discussing implications of this perspective for research and practice.
