Talks

ACAD: Activity-Centred Analysis and Design

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What the ACAD framework offers

The most recent explanation of ACAD is in this paper from ETR&D:

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2021). Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(2), 445-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09926-7

This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD has been developed over the last two decades. It has been tested and refined through collaborative analyses of a large number of complex learning situations and through research studies involving experienced and inexperienced design teams. The paper offers a definition and high level description of ACAD and goes on to explain the underlying motivation. The paper also provides an overview of two current areas of development in ACAD: the creation of explicit design rationales and the ACAD toolkit for collaborative design meetings. As well as providing some ideas that can help teachers, design teams and others discuss and agree on their working methods, ACAD has implications for some broader issues in educational technology research and development. It questions some deep assumptions about the framing of research and design thinking, in the hope that fresh ideas may be useful to people involved in leadership and advocacy roles in the field.

ACAD: the views at “learn time” and design time.

The following definition and explanation comes from p446 of the ETR&D paper.

Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) is a meta-theoretical framework for understanding and improving local, complex, learning situations.

Explaining what this means requires some shared terminology. (Emphasis added.)

We use the term ‘activity’ to mean ‘what students are actually doing’ – mentally, physically and emotionally – during a period of time in which they are meant to be learning something (a learning episode or ‘at learn-time’). For better or worse, what students actually do may differ considerably from what their teachers think they are doing or what their teachers intend them to do (Goodyear 2000; Ellis and Goodyear 2010; Elen 2020; Koh and Kan 2020).

We use the term ‘learning situation’ to underscore the point that students’ learning activity is always situated (Lave and Wenger 1991; Yeoman and Wilson 2019). As we explain later on, we take this to mean that learning activity is (at a minimum) physically, socially and epistemically situated. The more familiar term ‘learning environment’ does not reliably evoke all aspects of what makes learning activity situated.

We use the term ‘local’ because we also see educational work as situated (Pink 2012; Simonsen et al. 2014). It is done by real teachers in concrete situations. ACAD helps a teacher or team of teachers, with or without the help of a specialist educational designer or evaluator, to understand a learning situation in which they have a stake – where they have professional responsibility for students’ learning, some power to change aspects of the design of the learning situation, a need to understand how their students’ learning activity unfolds, and why it unfolds in the way that it does. Teachers’ work is usually cyclical. Although this is not universally the case, it is common to teach a course once a year, to analyse what is working well and why, and decide what needs changing and what can be left as it is. ACAD can help with brand new designs, but it has greater power when embedded in cycles of incremental improvement (Goodyear and Dimitriadis 2013).

We use the term ‘complex’ to indicate that teachers do not need an analysis and design methodology to diagnose simple problems and prescribe simple remedies (Ellis and Goodyear 2019). ACAD has a dual focus – analysing and understanding what exists and (re) designing for the future. This means ACAD also has a dual ontology, insofar as an actual instance of a learning activity and a design for future instances of similar learning activities are not the same kinds of thing. A map is not the territory. We see ACAD as meta-theoretical in that it does not insist on any one theory of learning. Indeed, it is agnostic about the kinds of theoretical explanations that are used in analysing learning situations and the kinds of design rationales expressed in designing for future learning. However, ACAD does highlight the need for credible explanations of local phenomena and for persuasive arguments in making design decisions.

The ACAD Video

Colleagues in the Sydney Business School and Copenhagen Business School made this short (3 minute) video about ACAD.

Other papers about ACAD and its associated ideas

Here are some pdf copies of papers and chapters on design for learning etc. They are all relevant to, but may not directly name, ‘ACAD’

Teaching as design (Goodyear 2015)

In medias res: reframing design for learning (Goodyear & Dimitriadis 2013)

Forward-oriented design for learning: illustrating the approach (Dimitriadis & Goodyear 2013)

Teaching-as-design and the ecology of university learning (Ellis & Goodyear 2010)

Learning, technology and design (Goodyear & Retalis 2010)

Patterns and pattern languages in educational design (Goodyear & Yang 2009)

Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern languages and design practice (Goodyear 2005)

Seeing learning as work: implications for analysis and design (Goodyear, 2000)

Pedagogical frameworks and action learning in ODL (Goodyear 1999)

Also strongly recommended:

Carvalho, L., & Goodyear, P. (Eds.). (2014). The architecture of productive learning networks. New York: Routledge.

Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2018). Framing learning entanglement in innovative learning spaces: connecting theory, design and practice. British Educational Research Journal, 44(6), 1120–1137. doi:doi:10.1002/berj.3483

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2016). Activity centred analysis and design in the evolution of learning networks. Paper presented at the Tenth International Conference on Networked Learning, Lancaster UK. 

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Dohn, N. B. (2016). Artefacts and activities in the analysis of learning networks. In T. Ryberg, C. Sinclair, S. Bayne, & M. de Laat (Eds.), Research, Boundaries and Policy in Networked Learning (pp. 93-110). New York: Springer.

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2019). The analysis of complex learning environments. In H. Beetham & R. Sharpe (Eds.), Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: principles and practices of design (3rd ed., pp. 49-65). Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer.

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., Yeoman, P., Castañeda, L., & Adell, J. (2020). Una herramienta tangible para facilitar procesos de diseño y análisis didáctico: Traducción y adaptación transcultural del toolkit ACAD. (A tangible tool to facilitate learning design and analysis discussions: Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the ACAD toolkit). Revista de Medios y Educación. 

Goodyear, P., Thompson, K., Ashe, D., Pinto, A., Carvalho, L., Parisio, M., . . . Yeoman, P. (2015). Analysing the structural properties of learning networks: architectural insights into buildable forms. In B. Craft, Y. Mor, & M. Maina (Eds.), The art and science of learning design (pp. 15-29). Rotterdam: Sense.

Sun, S. Y. H., & Goodyear, P. (2019). Social co-configuration in online language learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 36(2), 13-26. doi:https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5102

Yeoman, P., & Ashmore, N. (2018). Moving from pedagogical challenge to ergonomic challenge: Translating epistemology into the built environment for learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 34(6), 1-16. doi:10.14742/ajet.4502

Yeoman, P., & Carvalho, L. (2019). Moving between material and conceptual structure—developing a card-based method to support design for learning. Design Studies, 64, 64-89. 

Yeoman, P., & Wilson, S. (2019). Designing for situated learning: Understanding the relations between material properties, designed form and emergent learning activity. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(5), 2090-2108. 

ACAD talks/slide decks etc

A pre-recorded 20 minute talk for the 2020 AECT conference, related to the ACAD paper in ETR&D and AECT’s Distinguished Development award to Peter Goodyear. Slides etc for the AECT talk.

ACAD tools

The ACAD cards and wireframe are described in the Yeoman & Carvalho (2019) Design Studies paper mentioned above and in the 2021 ETR&D ACAD paper.

A digital implementation (in Spanish) of the cards/wireframe is under development by Linda Castañeda & colleagues – see the Goodyear, Carvalho, Yeoman, Castañeda & Adell (2020) paper mentioned above.

ACAD Cards in use: see Goodyear, Carvalho & Yeoman (2021) ETR&D paper.

ICCE 2020

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28th International Conference on Computers in Education

Here’s a copy of the slide deck I used in my keynote at the ICCE conference (25th November 2020). There are more slides/ideas in here than I discuss/use in the actual talk. Notably, there are a couple of slides very near the end containing follow-up references.

ICCE 2020 Goodyear Download

AECT 2020 Presentation

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The 2020 convention of the AECT – the Association for Educational Communications and Technology – moved ‘online’, like so many conferences this year. I was asked to make a presentation connected with my AECT/ETR&D Distinguished Development Award. There’s a recorded version of the presentation here on YouTube (takes about 20 minutes). Here’s a copy of the slides and notes (40 Meg.).

AECT 2020 Goodyear 01-11-2020 compactDownload

There’s an associated paper, mirroring some of the talk, currently under review with ETR&D. Here’s the abstract.

Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments

Peter Goodyear, Lucila Carvalho & Pippa Yeoman
Abstract

This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD has been developed over the last two decades. It has been tested and refined through collaborative analyses of a large number of complex learning situations and through research studies involving experienced and inexperienced design teams. The paper outlines the motivation for ACAD and describes a number of its central features. The paper also provides an overview of two current areas of development in ACAD: the creation of explicit design rationales and the ACAD toolkit for collaborative design meetings. As well as providing some ideas that can help teachers, design teams and others discuss and agree on their working methods, ACAD has implications for some broader issues in educational technology research and development. It questions some deep assumptions about the framing of research and design thinking, in the hope that fresh ideas may be useful to people involved in leadership and advocacy roles in the field.

Aligning education, digital and learning space strategies: an ecological approach

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These are slides to accompany the presentation I made at ITaLI, University of Queensland, this morning.

Rob Ellis and I have a chapter on this in a new book edited by Ron Barnett and Norman Jackson.

Our book length treatment was published earlier this year by Routledge.

Tasks, activities and student learning

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Talk at ITaLI, University of Queensland, 7th November 2019

The following references are cited in the slides/talk. Slides themselves are here: Goodyear UQ 2019-Nov-07 condensed.

Bearman, M., & Ajjawi, R. (2019). Can a rubric do more than be transparent? Invitation as a new metaphor for assessment criteria. Studies in Higher Education, 1-10.

Beckman, K., Apps, T., Bennett, S., Dalgarno, B., Kennedy, G., & Lockyer, L. (2019). Self-regulation in open-ended online assignment tasks: the importance of initial task interpretation and goal setting. Studies in Higher Education, 1-15.

Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does (3rd ed.). Buckingham: Open University Press.

Carvalho, L., & Goodyear, P. (Eds.). (2014). The architecture of productive learning networks. New York: Routledge.

Ellis, R., & Goodyear, P. (2010). Students’ experiences of e-learning in higher education: the ecology of sustainable innovation. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Forbes, D., & Gedera, D. (2019). From confounded to common ground: Misunderstandings between tertiary teachers and students in online discussions. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 35(4). doi:10.14742/ajet.3595

Goodyear, P. (2015). Teaching as design. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 2, 27-50. Retrieved from http://www.herdsa.org.au/system/files/HERDSARHE2015v02p27.pdf

Hadwin, Allyson, and Philip Winne. 2012. “Promoting Learning Skills in Undergraduate Students.” In Enhancing the Quality of Learning, edited by John R. Kirby and Michael J. Lawson, 201–27. New York: Cambridge University Press

Krippendorff, K. (2006). The semantic turn: a new foundation for design. Boca Raton FL: CRC Press.

Laurillard, D., Kennedy, E., Charlton, P., Wild, J., & Dimakopoulos, D. (2018). Using technology to develop teachers as designers of TEL: Evaluating the learning designer. British Journal of Educational technology, 49(6), 1044-1058. doi:10.1111/bjet.12697

Shuell, T. (1986). Cognitive conceptions of learning. Review of Educational Research, 56(4), 411-436.

Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sun, S. Y. H., & Goodyear, P. (2019). Social co-configuration in online language learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 36(2), 13-26. doi:https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5102

Wisner, A. (1995a). Understanding problem building: ergonomic work analysis. Ergonomics, 38(3), 595-605.

Wisner, A. (1995b). Situated cognition and action: implications for ergonomic work analysis and anthropotechnology. Ergonomics, 38(8), 1542-1557.

The Sydney Business School ACAD video (3 mins) is here: https://player.vimeo.com/video/302378219

Impact and engagement

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A few notes to accompany a panel session at Deakin, organised by CRADLE 14th October 2019.

Although my publications are reasonably well-cited and I can say that some of my work is taken up by other academics, my impact on policy and practice is quite marginal. There are claims I could make about specific areas of change in curricula or in how teams approach the design of learning environments. But these claims feel patchy to me: important in a specific program or university, but nothing that would count as credible evidence of impact at scale.

However – and this is an example of shiftily switching a practical into an academic problem – I am very interested in the pathways from research to policy and practice change. So, for example, I’ve been carrying out research on:

  • how university leaders construe the challenges of integrating educational, IT and physical infrastructure planning,
  • how to make educational design experience and design ideas easier to share and re-use,
  • how teams of academics and educational developers collaboratively design for students’ learning, and
  • what counts as ‘actionable knowledge’ in/for the design of programs of professional education.

I’ve also worked with AARE and other organisations, in Australia and elsewhere, on aspects of research policy: including approaches to the evaluation of research quality and impact and strategies for research capacity-building and engagement with ‘non-academic’ users of research.

At the panel session today, I summarised three ways that researchers in (higher) education tackle the challenges of ‘impact and engagement’. These descriptions are very broad brush, and not meant to offend. I’m calling them ‘thoughts and prayers’, ‘branding innovations’ and ‘research-practice partnerships’.

‘Thoughts and prayers’ is the default. A researcher writes up a study, an educational innovation or whatever, publishes a paper in a higher education journal and hopes that someone will read it, and be inspired to change what they do.

Much more noisy and visible is the work that goes on when a person or team coins a persuasive term and markets it hard. I will try not to be too cynical about this. Education is prone to fads and fashions and a set of research-based ideas can be taken up quite readily if they are presented as a discrete and coherent whole. I’m sure we can all think of some examples where a pithy phrase transforms into something that can be trade-marked, branded and/or sold as a commodity. Epistemic fluency,  teaching-as-design, design thinking, evaluative judgement, feedback literacy, visible learning, productive failure, flipped classrooms; even such large and hairy mammoths as PBL.

Only a small proportion of these get a breakthrough into the mass market. However:

  • those that do make it big tend to be used to set the mould (or expectations, or standards) for what educational impact should look like and
  • educational practices and educational systems have shown they are capable of radically reinterpreting research-based interventions and actually realising something very different from what was tested in the original research, and
  • what is easy to pick up as a package is easy to drop as a package.

A recent article in the ‘Fairfax’ papers illustrates this, with Deanna Kuhn’s work on ‘growth mindset’ as the example. The original research was deep, painstaking and insightful. The educational take-up, around the world, has been widespread and enthusiastic. But implementations are many and varied and some have moved a long way from anything Kuhn would recognise.  In other words ‘implementation fidelity’ is far from guaranteed in educational systems, so the connections between research, practice and outcomes can be very tenuous.

This brings me to the third approach, which I’ll subsume under the heading of ‘research practice partnerships’. There’s an excellent book on this by Bill Penuel and Daniel Gallagher. Rob Ellis and I summarised some of the ideas, customised for higher education, in the second half of our most recent book. The organising theme here is engagement, with impact on practice as one of the benefits – accompanied by a stronger, reciprocal, role for practitioners to shape research. The RPP idea has shaped some of our work in setting up the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation at Sydney University, though we have a long way to go yet.

Such partnerships have also influenced a strand in my own research – such that I’ve chosen to research educational practices in which there’s a reasonable chance that research-based knowledge will prove useful. For example, common sense and good evidence suggest that teachers are much better placed to consult research when they are designing for learning (‘upstream’ of a learning activity) than when they are in the middle of a live teaching-learning event. In addition, when the right materials, tools or spaces become available at the right time, they are likely to become part of prevailing practices and have beneficial and sustainable effects. Research-based ideas that take on a material form, such that they can become entangled in – and reshape – existing practices, live a different life from those that sit silently in the literature. Hence, I’ve researched the dynamics of design teams’ working practices and have experimented with rendering research-based insights in readily materializable forms (such as design patterns).

My final point: I’ve had a close involvement in setting up and/or running four research centres in the last 30 years. I’ve been drawn to this mode of working for a number of reasons. But one of them is a realisation that the intensification of pressures on academic researchers means it’s not sensible to try to be outstanding at all aspects/phases of the research lifecycle. For one person to be energetically forming new ideas for projects, securing funding, recruiting and guiding research teams, writing for academic and practitioner audiences, overseeing a suite of dissemination activities, liaising closely with practitioner communities and policy-makers, making cases for internal resources, etc etc – that’s a recipe for burnout and disaster. We can’t all be good at all these things all of the time. Also, some of them really benefit from specialist skills. Hence: if you want to engage in a sustainable way in processes that are likely to improve the impact of your research, you are best advised to work closely with kindred spirits.

See also:

Recent articles on the LSE Impact Blog by John Burgoyne and Toby Green.

The UK REF Impact case studies from Durham on Threshold Concepts and Lancaster on Evaluative research improving policy and practice.

The DETYA report on The Impact of Educational Research – published in 2000, but thorough and full of insights.

 

Deakin University, Learning and Teaching Conference

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The slides and notes for my lecture at the Deakin University Learning and Teaching conference last week – Thriving in higher education: how does good design help? – can be found here.

On the day after the lecture, Lina Markauskaite and I led two workshops.

Morning: Assessment as boundary work: between the discipline and the profession

Summary: This workshop is for academics, learning designers and academic leaders who work with developing assessment tasks across the spectrum of work integrated learning initiatives. Participants are asked to come with an assessment task that they have used, or plan to use, for students preparing for, or reflecting on, a work placement, practicum or simulated work experience. The workshop will explore how these types of assessment tasks create a dialogue at the boundary between academic discipline knowledge and the reflexive knowledge of a skilled practitioner. Peter and Lina will draw on their recent work on epistemic fluency to introduce the workshop. They have analysed a range of assessment task designs in a variety of professional education contexts to try to identify the multiple forms of knowledge and ways of knowing with which students have to become fluent in preparing for professional practice. Many aspects of professional work involve the creation of new understandings – such as in inter-professional dialogues or client consultations. Often this epistemic work goes unnoticed, though sometimes it involves conscious problem-solving and innovation. The workshop will be a hands-on investigation of how these ideas about epistemic fluency, knowledge work and actionable knowledge can be applied in designing better assessment tasks.

Afternoon: Working in the third space: how do we explain and strengthen what we do?

Summary: ‘Design for learning’ is still not a widely or deeply understood concept in universities, even though most universities employ a variety of people with titles like “Learning designer”.
The capabilities that underpin good design work are rarely articulated and have little institutional visibility. This workshop is for learning designers, academics and academic leaders who need to explain the role of design in learning and teaching. The workshop will explore the following questions: How do we articulate what we have to offer in and through design? How can we further strengthen the university’s design capabilities – given what we can see about the future of learning and teaching and new insights emerging from research across the learning sciences?

Some of these issues are being pursued, at a national level, in the ascilite TELedvisors SIG.