Exploring Learning Engineering Design Decision Tracking: Emergent Themes from Practitioners’ Work

Abstract This paper examines design decisions that were written down and enacted by learning design practitioners across 18 projects at a postsecondary institution. Through emergent coding of decisions recorded in a Learning Engineering Evidence and Decision (LEED) tracker in situ, this research answers 3 questions: (1) how do practitioners track and cite sources of influence on design decisions, (2) how do practitioners communicate, revisit, and iterate these decisions throughout cycles of their design, and (3) when revisions were made to decisions, what sources of influence led to these changes? Findings indicate that practitioners record new and revised decisions while also tracking influences on these decisions that stem from their own experiences and from the specific project context. This work contributes to the support of learning design practitioners by offering a tool to capture thinking and reasoning in complex contexts, while offering researchers a way to collect evidence of this decision making.