Co-Creation in the Design, Development and Implementation of Technology-Enhanced Learning

Co-creation is a term encompassing various forms of active stakeholder engagement and collaboration aiming at (i) innovation and research results that are more relevant and responsive to society, (ii) wider and more efficient adoption of research and innovation, and (iii) stronger ties of innovation with the individual end user/consumer. Several approaches have emerged to support these aims, including Co-Design, CoProduction, Participatory Design, Design-based Research, Research-based Design, Living Labs and DevOps, which we subsume under the term co-creation. All of them have a strong ethos of valuing and involving the experience, expertise and creativity of all members of a user community and wider society at least equally to those of the “formal” product/content creators [1]. Co-creation is also an important means to adhere to the EU’s Responsible Research and Innovation agenda and part of the ‘Science with and for the Society’ objective [2]. Within the TEL domain, co-creation plays a particularly important role as design and development move from relatively well-understood school-based or formal learning contexts into less structured and less well-understood areas such as informal learning and continuing professional development. Additionally, with wider acceptance of user-generated and digital open educational resources (OER) into formal and informal education, co-creation emerges as an invaluable tool for timely, relevant and high-quality digital content availability in TEL solutions. TEL appears as a natural “habitat” for co-creative approaches. The necessary co-creation focus on multiple stakeholders ties well with the interdisciplinary approach that is needed both in developing and deploying TEL designs. The democratic methodology that fosters equal voices and community-guided design goes along with TEL’s need for creative thinking, while maintaining a view of real limitations that are inherent in the underlying technologies and domain practices. In this context, this special issue aims to present an evidence-based discourse on the conceptual and practical challenges that arise from incorporating collaborative, creative and stakeholder-oriented principles in TEL environments. Crucially, the use, effectiveness, and impact of these co-creation approaches in the TEL community need to be better understood, allowing for the implementation of traceable and trustworthy studies meeting the standards of the TEL community at the same time.