Design-Based Research in Higher Education in Ecuador

Higher education in Ecuador face new challenges related to improving the quality of teaching and innovation in students´learning. One of the challenges is to integrate research with teaching activities, academic management, and community engagement. The Design-Based Research (DBR) approach becomes key and strategic for effective education and it allows staff to join an interdisciplinary team and influence their immediate context to improve their teaching practice, ensure the quality of the curriculum design, develop contextualized theories about the educational process. Based on a review of the literature, academic manuscripts of design-based research generated by Ecuadorian researchers and studies conducted in Ecuadorian educational contexts in different sources of information -such as repositories of Ecuadorian universities- in the last six years will be selected. In this way, it is proposed that Design-Based Research provides the fundamental epistemological and methodological horizons for faculty to integrate research with curriculum design and teaching practice. Thus, educational research will be more concrete and applicable in the immediate contexts of the professor for their improvement and innovation, and in turn, the practice itself will reformulate the theory that underpins educational action.