This special collection features articles from participants at the 8th International Designs for Learning Conference, “Conceptualizing Design in Research and Developmental Work”. The focus of the conference and the special collection is the versatility of the design concept, which extends from the theoretical and analytical level to the more practical level, where it can be used to shape concrete activities and tools for multimodal communication, teaching, and learning.

The conference was held in August 2024 at Stockholm University’s Department of Education. A total of 43 abstracts, workshops, and symposia were presented, and delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Eight articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below.

Programming was introduced in the Swedish national curriculum (grades 1–9) in 2017, requiring all teachers intwo subjects—mathematics and technology—to teach programming starting in fall 2018. The study presentedin this article is part of a longitudinal research project on programming education in two primary schools inSweden.

This article focuses on data collected through classroom observations conducted from 2019 to 2021, specifically on teacher introductions of programming activities in grades 1–8. A total of 383 minutes of introductions have been observed and analyzed through (1) a design for learning perspective, combined with (2) the Scratch computational thinking framework. The analysis has shed light on how teachers introduce programmingin practice and identified three strategies used: explorative, structured, and systematic. Furthermore, our findings suggest that teachers primarily introduce programming using existing online resources, which areutilized in various ways depending on the strategy employed. While a teacher using an explorative strategy tends to outsource the teaching to resources, a teacher with a systematic strategy integrates and facilitates a discussion with students using resources as support. The same teacher can, however, employ different strategies depending on, for instance, the grade level or the topic to be covered. Our results highlight several key areas that require further investigation from both research and educational perspectives.

Education and teacher practices are increasingly entangled with anticipations of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change education. Implications for teacher education are not wholly understood. This study explores anticipations of AI in K–12 education and teachers’ pedagogical practices, and contributes to an understanding of the anticipated impacts of AI on teacher education. Interviews were conducted with experts in computer science and teacher education. Findings identify different ways AI is anticipated to influence teachers’ professional agency and judgement. The paper discusses implications for the implementation and organisation of AI in teacher education, emphasising the inclusion of educational sciences in the development of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED).

Flexibility in distance education is often regarded as an inherently positive concept. Taking a more critical approach, this article distinguishes between temporal-spatial flexibility, defined as enabling students to choose the time, pace and place of their studies, and pedagogical flexibility, defined as offering education that is tailored to the pedagogical needs and preferences of students. This study aims to investigate pedagogical flexibility in distance education characterized by a high degree of temporal-spatial flexibility. Focus group interviews with 46 adult distance educators were conducted. Themes that explained reasons for lower and higher degrees of pedagogical flexibility were identified. It was found that pedagogical flexibility was challenging to achieve in a setting characterized by high temporal-spatial flexibility. In conclusion, a model of temporal-spatial and pedagogical flexibility is discussed. It can be used to guide research and practice in understanding flexibility in distance education as a complex and nuanced concept.

In the following research review, 57 articles were analysed to get an insight into research in the field of computational thinking and programming in K–12. The results show that empirical research regarding programming and computational thinking is prevalent in the USA and Greece. The articles were published in 43 different academic journals. A fast-growing number of articles published in the research field during 2006–18 indicate growing interest. The articles were analysed and clustered into seven strands: 1) Evaluating digital resources, 2) Assessment, 3) Improving students’ academic performance through programming, 4) Gender and equity, 5) Games – as a method to learn programming, 6) Attitudes and motivations, and 7) Teachers’ competencies and teaching. An extensive focus is on the evaluation of different technical solutions as well as pedagogical methods. Implications for teaching and learning programming and developing computational thinking skills are discussed.

Research informing adult education teachers' didactic practices in distance education is scarce. Approaching the adult learner's perspectives on how distance education is perceived is key to informing future initiatives. This study explores adult learners' perception of distance education, concentrating on aspects such as, social presence, course structure, and perceived learning and satisfaction. A survey was distributed to teachers (n = 78) in five schools organising adult distance education. Findings show that teacher accessibility and course structure correlated positively with social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction. Overall, adult learners are satisfied with their distance teaching. A challenge facing adult distance education is to create a sense of social presence despite the high demand for flexibility. Thus, we explored learner perceptions of benefits and challenges in distance education and structured these into social, cognitive, spatio-temporal, emotional, and technical dimensions. Findings reveal that one challenge in the social dimension was a lack of connection with peers, and a benefit in the cognitive dimension referred to autonomy and self-regulation. These findings are important as educational institutions and policymakers may strive for high flexibility, which in turn may lead to lower group cohesion and a lack of social presence.

Även om forskning har bedrivits om självreglerat lärande i relation till lärandeanalys finns det fortfarande en kunskapslucka när det gäller de hinder som elever i gymnasieutbildningen möter i att reglera sitt eget lärande och hur lärandeanalys kan stödja deras självreglering. Denna artikel undersöker två frågor: 1) Vilka utmaningar upplever gymnasieelever i processen att reglera sitt eget lärande?, och 2) Vilken information och data behöver gymnasieelever för att bättre kunna reglera sitt eget lärande? Vi genomförde en studie på en medelstor gymnasieskola i Mellansverige för att bättre förstå hur dessa frågor manifesterar sig bland eleverna. Vi analyserade data som samlats in av skolan två gånger årligen mellan 2015 och 2022 och administrerade ett frågeformulär till 224 elever för att besvara forskningsfrågorna. Genom beskrivande statistik och en tematisk analys identifierar vi vanliga problem som elever stöter på samt den information som är nödvändig för att stötta självreglerat lärande. Vi diskuterar implikationerna av våra fynd för utformningen av system som förser elever med relevant data för att förbättra deras lärandeupplevelser.

While research has been conducted on self-regulated learning in relation to learning analytics, there remains a knowledge gap regarding the obstacles secondary education students face in regulating their learning and how learning analytics can support their self-regulation. This paper investigates two questions: 1) What challenges do secondary education students experience in the process of regulating their own learning?, and 2) What information and data do secondary education students need to better regulate their own learning? We conducted a study at a mid-sized upper secondary school in middle Sweden, to better understand how these issues manifest among students. We analyzed data collected by the school twice annually between 2015 and 2022, and administered a questionnaire to 224 students to answer the research questions. Through descriptive statistics and a thematic analysis, we identify prevalent problems that students encounter, as well as the necessary information that is essential for scaffolding self-regulated learning. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of systems that provide students with relevant data to enhance their learning experiences.

This special collection contains articles from participants in the 7th International Designs for Learning Conference – Remediation of Learning. The focus of the conference and the special collection is on current changes in the designs of information and knowledge representations and their consequences on how we understand and evaluate learning and communication.

The conference was held in May 2021 and due to the pandemic it was run digitally through Zoom. A total of 43 abstracts were submitted, and all delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Five articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below, along with an acknowledgement of the abstracts presented during the conference.

Using data from focus group interviews, this study aims to analyze the perceived opportunities and challenges encountered by groups of secondary school teachers regarding the assessment of multimodal texts. Previous research has shown that digital technologies introduce new kinds of texts in the classroom. The possibility of combining verbal text with image, sound, and movement has an impact on students’ text production. However, the changing role of writing on the screen has left teachers uncertain of how to assess these new forms of texts. Apart from attending to digital competence, assessing multimodal texts may involve following writing conventions and organizing text using different resources and components. Quality in multimodal texts may concern using multimodal components to communicate complex ideas effectively, which may or may not be noticed by teachers. The data is based on group interviews with 11 secondary school teachers at two different schools. The study conducted a thematic content analysis using the analytical concepts of transformation, recognition, design, and form and meaning. Findings show that teachers find it challenging to acknowledge certain qualities in students’ multimodal texts without support from the steering documents. On the other hand, they notice opportunities to follow students’ learning processes. In addition, they stress an increased opportunity and need for shared assessment across school subjects. The article concludes with a discussion of tensions regarding opportunities and challenges when assessing students’ multimodal texts in relation to the different subject syllabuses.

A Designs for Learning perspective, with its close attention to the setting and the materiality of communications, is well-suited for research closely connected to the actions taken by professionals and participants. This may be research on others, where the interest is to understand how learning is supported and/or limited in a certain context, while also considering the complexities of that context. There may also be research with others, where the emphasis is on mak-ing changes in practices while investigating these changes, where researchers, professionals, and other participants collaborate. In such collaborations profes-sionals may, for example, be working in schools as teachers and school leaders (i.e., in formal settings), or as staff working in semi-formal settings such as museums (see Chapter 8  by Insulander & Öhman in this volume). Here, we discuss both design research on others and with others, with specific attention given to ethical considerations and aspects. In this chapter we discuss ethical considerations, following the LDS model ( Figure 4.1 ) from left to right; starting with the setting, which is framed by the resources at hand, and the institutional norms and regulations. This section is followed by ethical considerations in relation to the transformation units where interactions take place in different kinds of situations, constituted by transformations within and transductions between modes (e.g., pictures, body movements, speech). After this we address ethical considerations concerning participants’ roles vis-à-vis a Designs for Learning framework.