Exploring pre-established performed roles in a networked learning activity

This paper presents the first part of a wider sociomaterial research, which aims at exploring alternative ways to look at and analyse the learning activity in a university course, which would lead to an understanding of what learning activity emerges from a learning design, and therefore, to the improvement of the own learning design by promoting decisions for informed change and innovation. This study analyses a university undergraduate pre-service teachers course run by a professor and followed by 58 students divided into 8 workgroups. The course includes networked learning activities, where the connections between three basic structures (cooperative work, activity-based learning and pre-established work roles) are cornerstone, therefore: students perform different pre-established roles in a workgroup and develop week tasks related to the topics of the course (ICT for primary schools). The main goal of this paper is to visualise and analyse students' learning activities based on pre-determined roles through VNA and the students' perceptions on the roles, which is one of the three basic structures mentioned before, as well as its comparison with the declared learning design. As methodology for this sociomaterial research, we followed a mixed analysis approach that combines data from the learning design of the course, the documented performance of the different roles during the course (blog posts) presented in the form of networked maps through the technique of visual network analysis, and the students’ questionnaire on the perceptions of those roles. As examples of the performed roles, the cases of the Analyst and the Journalist were studied from that threefold data approach, but we reflect on the general aspects of all of them. The results of these analyses show that the students’ documented performance of the roles highly corresponds to the learning design, and suggest that there are some operational chains between roles -that would be confirmed by further studies-. The bias of starting from a given previous structure (the learning design and the students' documented performance) should be considered as a limitation for a sociomaterial research like this one, but a first step of a broader analysis; therefore, future studies will explore other perspectives. As conclusions, we stress that the visual network analysis may be a fruitful approach to learning design and learning activity in a more complementary way to other types of traditional analysis.