Research Design Strategies for Technology-Enhanced Learning in Higher Education: Insights from CORE

Research Design Strategies for Technology-Enhanced Learning in Higher Education: Insights from CORE

📅 Monday 18/05 16:00-17:30h

📍 Workshop Space A

🔎 Needs Analysis

Research in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) requires PhD candidates and early-stage researchers to develop and coordinate research design, implementation, and evaluation. Many researchers experience difficulties in developing applied research, particularly when aligning research questions and objectives with assessment design, data collection and analyses in interdisciplinary TEL contexts. TEL studies involve multiple stakeholders, diverse learning environments, and multimodal data, increasing complexity. These characteristics highlight the need for robust and well-aligned research design strategies, especially for planning, designing, and executing empirical studies in Higher Education (HE). This workshop addresses these needs by focusing on research design strategies for controlled and assessment-driven TEL studies. Using the Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE) project as a case study, the workshop discusses how design decisions and strategies support the generation of meaningful evidence about learning processes.

📒 Session Description

The workshop follows an interactive and practice-oriented format combining short input sessions with guided hands-on activities and group discussions. It begins with an introduction to the topic and project followed by an overview of longitudinal research designs in TEL and key methodological challenges related to assessments and multimodal data. Participants will then engage in structured activities focused on task definition, assessment planning, and data interpretation using simplified datasets inspired by the CORE project. Through collaborative discussion and reflection, participants will examine trade-offs in research design decisions and explore strategies for visualizing and interpreting longitudinal data. The workshop concludes with an interactive discussion on how research design choices and data-informed reporting practices support the generation of transferable, methodologically consistent, and ethically grounded knowledge in TEL research.

💡 Learning Objectives

After participating in this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Identify key characteristics and design choices of longitudinal studies in TEL, including participant recruitment, ethical considerations, and data management strategies;
2. Design assessments and rating schemes aligned with research objectives and learning tasks in higher education contexts;
3. Understand exploratory approaches for processing and analysing multimodal data using introductory database structures and analytical workflows;
4. Apply basic strategies for data acquisition, annotation, cleaning, and manipulation of multimodal educational data (hands-on activities);
5. Interpret and visualise longitudinal TEL data to support theory-driven conclusions and effective research reporting.

Through this workshop, participants will develop a deeper understanding of engagement in TEL, seeing it not just as behavior or cognition but as a complex, ethically informed, and wellbeing-centered experience.