Designing a Mobile-Messaging App-Based Teachers’ Community of Practice in India

Abstract

A mobile-based messaging app (MMA) was implemented as a teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context through a large-scale educational initiative. The development process adopted a Design-based Research approach to test underlying theories in real-world settings. The researchers theorised the pedagogical affordances of the MMA Telegram using Davis and Chouinard's theoretical framework of affordances, defined as a relational process among users, designers, the environment, and the artefact. This paper discusses the iterative design process in detail. The findings showed that the MMA encourages accessibility and for teachers to showcase their practice in the online community of practice and refuses (does not allow) the development of the online community of practice as an epistemic community.