A Patterns Based Approach for Design of Educational Technologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel patterns-based framework for designing educational technologies by connecting instructional design patterns with software architecture patterns, demonstrated through a large-scale literacy case study.

Contribution

It presents the first integrated approach combining instructional design patterns with software architecture patterns for educational technology development.

Findings

Successful application in a large-scale adult literacy case study

Adoption by the Indian National Literacy Mission Authority

Development of web and mobile versions of the educational tools

Abstract

Instructional design is a fundamental base for educational technologies as it lays the foundation to facilitate learning and teaching based on pedagogical underpinnings. However, most of the educational technologies today face two core challenges in this context: (i) lack of instructional design as a basis (ii) lack of support for a variety of instructional designs. In order to address these challenges, we propose a patterns based approach for design of educational technologies. This is in contrast with existing literature that focuses either on patterns in education or in software, and not both. The core idea of our approach is to leverage patterns for modeling instructional design knowledge and to connect it with patterns in software architecture. We discuss different categories of patterns in instructional design. We then present the notion of Pattern-Oriented Instructional Design (POID) as a way to model instructional design as a connection of patterns (GoalPattern, ProcessPattern, ContentPattern) and integrate it with Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (POSA) based on fundamental principles in software engineering. We demonstrate our approach through adult literacy case study (287 million learners, 22 Indian Languages and a variety of instructional designs). The results of our approach (both web and mobile versions) are available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and were adopted by National Literacy Mission Authority of Government of India.