Helping Instructors Scaffold Students' Design of Educational Technology Projects

The design of effective learning technologies is a complex and ill-structured practice that can be difficult to teach to future generations of designers. Here we discuss our development of a tool that scaffolds students' design activity by prompting them to consider, in writing, many of the key issues that professional designers confront when planning a new project. This tool, called Gorp ("Gallery, Organizer, and Repository of Projects"), is a Web-based application used by universities across the country. Gorp has evolved to scaffold critical and often overlooked aspects of learning technology design through its organization of descriptive categories. The system is also designed to encourage students to collect feedback on their projects and iterate them through a process of testing and revision.