CuVIS Tool to Develop Instructors’ Competency in Creating Meaningful Learning Designs

Abstract

Visualizations are effective teaching-learning resource. But their effectiveness is undermined if the instructor simply lectures with the tool. Such ineffective integration of visualization persists in spite of existing teaching guidelines, teacher training workshops, portals for sharing best practices and learning design (LD) tools. In fact, the problem gets compounded at the tertiary level where visualization integration is left to individual instructors. In the current paper, we present the Customized Visualization Integration (CuVIS) tool targeted at college instructors teaching in instructor-mediated classrooms. Such classrooms were chosen since they are the norm in colleges in India and the developing world. CuVIS takes objective, activity time requirements and domain as instructor inputs and outputs a LD customized to the instructor’s context. A semester-long study with a cohort of 4 instructors across 3 time points was conducted. We found CuVIS use led to increase in instructors’ TPACK in terms of their competency in designing student-centered LDs with visualization. Analysis of these LDs revealed CuVIS scaffolding was successful in veering instructors towards creating theory-informed LDs aligned to their instructional objective and the 5 dimensions of Meaningful Learning. This paper also contributes to LD research by identifying points in the LD process where instructors required help and the scaffolds that successfully addressed the difficulties. CuVIS is also a valuable training resource for teacher educators at the tertiary level.