I recently had the opportunity to interview ten maths teachers from different secondary schools across Catalonia, as part of a research project that tried to understand how the adoption of information and communication technologies for teaching (ICTTs) is transforming homework practices in this educational stage (what are its advantages and limitations, and what recommendations could be given to schools and families around digitally mediated homework practices).
A total of twelve hours of interviews allowed addressing many issues, but the one I would like to highlight in this post is the complexity of current virtual learning ecosystems, arising from the diversity of tools and resources used by teachers and students to carry out their homework-related interactions, as it is reflected in the following table.
This document lists all ICTTs that participants reported using during the different stages of the homework process (task identification, assignment, presentation, completion, follow-up, and assessment). While columns display the mentioned technologies, grouped into eight different categories, according to the purpose of their use, rows reflect the teachers’ actual ICTT setup. Therefore, an entire row presents the particular virtual learning ecosystem run by each teacher, while an entire column shows to what extent participants used a specific ICTT.
The table offers many insights and prompts questions in different directions that may inspire future posts, such as are schools sufficiently well-equipped? Is Google Classroom displacing Moodle from mandatory educational stages, and should this concern public authorities? What will be the role of digital textbooks in this new paradigm? Does the adoption of specialized content applications favour more disperse and decentralised ecosystems? Who is deciding what ICTTs are being adopted and why? But beyond these specific issues, overall, the document allows us to understand the complexity and singularity of the current digital environment in schools… and even more so if we consider that this table refers to just one subject.
We usually talk about Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to refer to digital spaces where teachers and students interact, access content, carry out activities and are able to monitor them, but it might be more useful to talk about Virtual Learning Ecosystems since, as it is the case, the different digital educational events comprising a learning practice such as homework, are happening in independent, dispersed, yet potentially integrable environments and digital platforms. In this sense, the concept of ecosystem, as the space in which several VLEs interact in a more or less centralized way, can help us describe the reality of current digital learning spaces as well as to identify the challenges that must be addressed for a better adoption of technologies in the classroom, both from an educational and technological point of view.
