Design playfully inclusive digital education

This seminar is taught since summer term 2022 at the University of Vienna (2022S, 2022W, 2023S, 2023W, 2024S).

Content
Inclusive, digital teaching is an essential task for teachers. This seminar offers students a chance to approach this task in a playful and creative way. To this end, students will learn about design thinking and gamification as learning and teaching strategies. Among other things, design thinking allows for a creative, playful examination of complex topics and promotes the collaborative finding of solutions to wicked problems. Gamification in a broader sense means using playful elements for learning content.

Students work in small groups on a self-selected question on the topic of the seminar (design of inclusive, digital education). They acquire an understanding of why it is important to consciously ask how as many learners as possible can be reached. This includes reflecting on internalized ideas, becoming aware of possible, unconscious moments of exclusion and thus being able to work on them. This is done by developing a product (depending on the interest of the students, a game, a blog/vlog, a podcast, a prototype for an app, a didactic guide, …) under the guidance of the instructor in the seminar and documenting and reflecting on this process. For this purpose, the Compuational Empowerment Lab (ce-lab.univie.ac.at/) can be used and different resources can be tried out.

Aims

After completion of this seminar:

  • Students experimented with Design Thinking as a learning strategy, which can be applied e.g. in the context of digital basic education.
  • Students understand why it is important to actively design anti-discriminatory teaching.
  • Students understand how social inequalities can influence educational success.
  • Students advanced their sensitivity for inequality and their own privileges.
  • Students developed and tried out initial approaches to combat inequality in education.
  • Students learned and applied strategies to reach and support diverse learners in their learning.