Abstract
The pedagogical mediation in Distance Education (DE) is sustained by hypermediatic didactic materials, which are marked by principles of autonomy, interaction, interactivity, motivation and cooperation. The main thought in this article is to know if the developed Teaching-Learning Objects (T-LO) are potentially meaningful answering these principles. The planning and elaboration of the T-LO are highlighted processes in Brazil. Therefore, the authors present the conceptual singularities of the T-LO; the Instructional Design (ID) processes and the importance of the Instructional Project (IP) elaboration to guarantee a meaningful potentiality of the T-LO. As a research result, the authors center attention on the contribution of a framework (called the T-LO List), which is used to analyze the T-LO developed, implemented, and evaluated in a specific context of a didactic module elaboration. In conclusion, it is important to realize that the usage of a framework to analyze the T-LO can orient theoretical methodological steps of planning, developing, implementing, observing, reflecting, and re-planning, all carried out by multidisciplinary teams.
TopSetting The Stage
The principle of action-reflecting-action sustaining the teaching-research activities during the cyclic steps of planning, implementation, observation, evaluation and re-planning is shown in Figure 1, which makes a link with our functions like teachers, instructional designers and tutors in distance courses.
Figure 1. Article structure (© 2009, Ingrid Kleist Clark Nunes and Elena Maria Mallmann. Used with permission.)
The organization of multidisciplinary teams to produce hypermedia and printed didactic materials is still a recent phenomenon in Brazil, especially in public and higher education. The insertion of Teaching-Learning Virtual Environments (T-LVE) and the T-LO in pedagogical mediation, to speed up autonomy, cooperation and interaction, has produced innovation in the teaching-learning process for universities.
Therefore, our teacher and research activities have been guided by the development of strategies, methodologies and technologies that can contribute in team management. This also can contribute to answer some challenges caused by course structure, financial issues, technological issues, epistemological and pedagogical principles, all related with the T-LO elaboration process for distance courses (Mallmann, 2008; Nunes, 2008).
Beyond the framework development to analyze the T-LO potentiality, which is going to be detailed in the “case description” section; we are going to contribute in two ways:
- 1.
The conceptual production about theories and ID functions in multidisciplinary teams. We present the concept “designer of mediation” (Mallmann, 2008) referenced in the purpose of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This definition shows a meaning of a “problem-solving process”, which is coherent with the cyclical principle of the “action-reflecting-action” and also includes the re-planning step as an essential step in the mediation design. With this idea, the mediation design expands the comprehension beyond the prescriptive functions of the “ID theories” and the technical activities of the instructional designer work realized in the T-LO production steps; and
- 2.
The elaboration of a check-list (called Perfo_List) to manage the retrospective and prospective actions in multidisciplinary teams which produce didactic materials for DE (Mallmann, 2008).