Teachers as Designers: At the Confluence of Technology, Pedagogy and OER

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning is an outcome of the integration of technology and pedagogy. While technology integration can augment the teaching-learning process, teachers’ willingness and their capacity to use technology and pedagogy creatively and meaningfully is crucial to student learning. For effective technology integration, teachers require specific knowledge on three broad knowledge bases - technology, pedagogy, and content, and their complex inter-relationships, as described in the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Teachers also require competencies in putting into practice this synthesized knowledge, when designing learning experiences for their students. While TPACK offers a good conceptual framework about the interplay of content, technological and pedagogical knowledge, the synergy of technology and pedagogy in the teaching-learning process calls for serious attention to the design of learning experiences in teacher professional development programmes. This needs careful thought about the intersections of subject matter content, pedagogy and technological affordances, and what design strategies would support them to develop the required competencies (Naidu, 2016). This chapter reports on the experiences of teacher educators’ in the integration of content, pedagogy and technology, during an OER-integrated online professional development course. A scenario-based learning (SBL) approach (Naidu, 2010; 2006) was adopted in this course, within which participants assumed the role of ‘teachers as designers’ of productive student learning experiences.