Pulling together: keeping track of pedagogy, design and evaluation through the development of scenarios—a case study

Abstract

This case study describes the multipurpose use of scenarios in a large multinational research project (MOBIlearn) whose aims are to design and develop a pedagogically sound mobile learning environment. Maintaining effective communication and design focus in large consortia is a well‐known problem (see Carroll, 2000), and we describe the role of scenarios in addressing this. Scenarios were initially used to simply envision the future system in order to inform design, but as the project progressed, the role of the scenarios grew to encompass (i) relating system design and implementation to pedagogy by providing a common frame of reference for developers and pedagogic experts; (ii) through a process of refinement, defining the evaluation strategy for the user trials; and (iii) allowing us to keep the user at the heart of the development project. Thus, scenarios helped to resolve the difficulty identified by Taylor (2004) of how to bring together the relatively high level issues of pedagogic evaluation and the more technical user‐centred system evaluation. The development of a first‐aid training scenario is used as an illustrative example.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the European Union for financial support through the MOBIlearn project IST‐2001‐37440. We would also like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the Open University first‐aiders.