Report on the co-design process of Duct Tape University project

Chesterman, MJ (2014) Report on the co-design process of Duct Tape University project. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This report offers a narrative analysis of a co-design process undertaken to create a web-based repository for learning resources. The process involved numerous stakeholders and draws on diverse elements of theory and practice. Stakeholders include MMU, who are assessing this work, JISC who provided funding as part of the Summer of Student Innovation project and Community Arts North West who are the target user group. Communities of practice can provide fantastic opportunities for rich user feedback when creating tools or services together. Wenger identifies them as a key component to the process of building social learning systems (2000). The sharing of learning resources seems perfect activity to create greater communication between a community of practice of trainers. However, research in the context of the UK OER projects funded by JISC shows that there are tensions and barriers which can impede the effective exchange of learning resources, certainly in the form of OER (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2015). This multimedia report makes observations on the potential for a co-design process to help the adoption of open sharing of learning resources. It also documents a process to put these practices into action through the co-creation of a web-based repository for a specific community of practice. As part of the process, a large amount of data has been gathered in the form of photographs of the process, audio recordings of sessions and video interviews surrounding evaluation, design and dissemination. While, there is sufficient source material for a significant study beyond the remit of this report, the goal of this report is to briefly introduce the area of interests surrounding this project based on a review of relevant literature, to outline activities undertaken and to make broad observations on lesson learned and questions raised by the process. This chapter is divided into four main sections, this introduction, a section on theory and the framing of the project, an outline of project activities and finally a reflective summary. This report takes the form of an ebook in ePub format. There is more information on the technical process of its creation in section titled the making of this report. A chief reason for choosing the ePub format is the possibility to include the audio, video and photos gathered on the projects blog in a self-contained format. The contents of this report are also online here: http://blog.ducttapeuni.org. The focus of this report is to communicate the breadth rather than depth in any one area. The media contained in this whole document can be seen a resource to dip into the purpose being to convey a rich, impressionistic sense of the project. This chapter provides a more traditional frame for the project. It intersperses citations to academic work using Harvard reference system and hyper-links to other chapters of this ePub.