Open the 'Black Boxes' of Teaching

Joint research and design processes of technology use in the transition to online teaching.

Abstract

In 2020 and 2021, Covid-19 demanded a transition to online teaching at universities. This article explores how a group of students and lecturers on the course ICT, interaction and organization at Information Science, Aalborg University in Copenhagen have used the experiences from the digital transformation as a basis for rethinking teaching and the established learning designs using only digital technologies. The students were challenged to further develop the use of Moodle as a learning platform to support teaching and learning online and on-site in the context of problem-based learning (PBL). Throughout the work, two ‘black boxes’ in particular were opened - ie. processes that are mutually invisible when the teaching takes place as usual. These black boxes included the students’ 'preparation and the teachers' organization of teaching, respectively. The contribution of the article is to continue to open these black boxes through the use of theory, interviews and design development as well as to expose the actors and structures that are not otherwise made explicit in the teaching.