Dr. Robert Weathers currently works as curriculum developer for California Southern University. In this position, chiefly administrative, he supervises the creation of new curriculum (courses, programs) in the university's masters-level and doctoral programs in marriage and family therapy, and clinical psychology, respectively. In addition, he is actively involved in accreditation, staff development, and quality assurance across all programs in CalSouthern's School of Behavioral Sciences.
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.
enABLe is Portsmouth's University's emergent framework to support an innovative approach to team-based learning design. We are currently refining the elements of an enABLe workshop and toolkit, that colleagues across the University have helped to define through a series of pilot events.
Y. Yang, C. Huang, L. Xia, and C. Li. Proceedings of the 45th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, page 1434--1443. (2022)
L. He, M. Mavrikis, and M. Cukurova. Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners, Doctoral Consortium and Blue Sky, page 327--333. Cham, Springer Nature Switzerland, (2024)