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Most social challenges fall outside of the authority of any single individual and therefore require collective action—coordinated efforts by many stakeholders to implement solutions. Despite growing interest in teaching students to lead collective action, we lack models for how to teach these skills. Collective action ostensibly involves design: the act of planning to change existing situations into preferred ones. In other domains, instructors commonly scaffold design using an instructional model known as studio critique in which students strengthen their plans by exchanging arguments with peers and instructors. This study explores whether studio critique can serve as the basis for an effective instructional model in collective action. Using design-based research methods, we designed and implemented scoping deliberations, a new instructional model that augments studio critique with domain-specific templates for planning collective action and repeats weekly to enable iterations. We used process tracing to analyze data from field notes, video, and artifacts to evaluate causal explanations for events observed in this case study. By implementing scoping deliberations in a 10-week undergraduate course, we found that this model appeared effective at scaffolding engagement in planning collective action: students articulated and refined their plans by engaging in argumentation and iteration, as expected. However, students struggled to contact the community stakeholders with whom they planned to work. As a result, their plans rested on implausible, untested assertions. These findings advance instructional science by showing that collective action may require new instructional models that help students to test their assertions against feedback from community stakeholders. Practically, scoping deliberations appear most useful for scaffolding thoughtful planning in conditions when students are already collaborating with stakeholders. 

To create design solutions experienced engineering designers engage in expert iterative practice. Researchers find that students struggle to learn this critical engineering design practice, particularly when tackling real‐world engineering design problems.

To improve our ability to teach iteration, this study contributes (i) a new teaching approach to improve student teams' expert iterative practices, and (ii) provides support to existing frameworks—chiefly the Design Risk Framework—that predict the key metacognitive processes we should support to help students to engage in expert iterative practices in real‐world engineering design.

In a 3‐year design‐based research study, we developed a novel approach to teaching students to take on real‐world engineering design projects with real clients, users, and contexts to engage in expert iterative practices.

Study 1 confirms that student teams struggle to engage in expert iterative practices, even when supported by problem‐based learning (PBL) coaching. Study 2 tests our novel approach, Planning‐to‐Iterate, which uses (i) templates, (ii) guiding questions to help students to define problem and solution elements, and (iii) risk checklists to help student teams to identify risks. We found that student teams using Planning‐to‐Iterate engaged in more expert iterative practices while receiving less PBL coaching.

This work empirically tests a design argument—a theory for a novel teaching approach—that augments PBL coaching and helps students to identify risks and engage in expert iterative practices in engineering design projects.

 

As people increasingly innovate outside of formal R&D departments, individuals take on the responsibility of attracting, managing, and protecting social, financial, human, and information capital. With internet technology playing a central role in how individuals work together to produce something that they could not produce alone, it is necessary to understand how technologies are shaping the innovation process from start to finish. We bring together human-computer interaction researchers and industry leaders who have worked with people and platforms designed to support collective innovation across diverse domains. We will discuss the current and future research on the role of platforms in collective innovation, including topics in social computing, crowdsourcing, peer production, online communities, gig economy, & online marketplaces. 

As people increasingly work different jobs, the responsibility of building long-term career satisfaction and stability increasingly falls more on the workers rather than individual employers. With technologies playing a central role in how people choose and access employment opportunities, it is necessary to understand how online technologies are shaping career development. We bring together leading human-computer interaction researchers, industry members, and community organizers, who have worked with systems and people across the socio-economic spectrum during the career development process. We will discuss research on the role of online technologies in career development, including but not limited to topics in crowd work, social media sites, and freelance work sites.