Exploring teachers’ needs and the existing barriers to the adoption of Learning Design methods and tools: a literature survey

Abstract

Learning Design (LD) is oriented to support teachers in designing their teaching with the aim to provide a sound pedagogical background and to make effective use of resources and technologies. In spite of the significant number of LD approaches and tools proposed so far, their adoption is still very limited and this represents an unsolved challenge in the field of LD. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature about learning design tools, tackling the issue of adoption from two points of view: teachers’ needs in relation to LD tools and methods and possible barriers to their adoption. The review includes only research papers where teachers’ behaviours and opinions are directly explored and not purely theoretical papers. The search included five main academic databases in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) plus a search on Google about project reports; the resulting corpus included 423 papers: 26 of these, plus 3 reports were included in the final list for the analysis. The review provides a systematic overview of the knowledge developed in the LD field, focusing on a set of research gaps that need further exploration in the future.