Understanding Concepts and Values for the Future of Online Education through the Practice of Design

Abstract

The rise of interest in online education from pedagogical, administrative, and technological perspectives presents numerous possibilities and challenges for researchers and practitioners, the most basic of which is the fundamental question of the determination of the concepts, categories, and values used to guide their work within this rapidly developing field. Drawing from contemporary discussions of the possibility for the instantiation of values and categories in the work of design, critical approaches to questions of technology and conceptual development surrounding the design of technological systems are discussed. It is argued that current value driven approaches to technological design, when refined and considered through a logic of conceptual deconstruction, offer a broad and open basis from which the direction of online education can best be considered. In the formulation of such an approach, general lessons for interaction design and information science as a whole can be found.