Around the world, there are accomplished people dedicated to raising the quality of design of educational processes and materials.
ISDDE was formed to help this group work effectively as a coherent professional design and development community.
The goals of the Society are:
improving the design and development process
building a design community
increasing our impact on educational practice
The Fellows are designers and project leaders with outstanding records, together with some representatives from government agencies and foundations that fund such work.
In this issue, the authors describe, explain, demonstrate and reflect on practical design strategies that they have used in curriculum development, from primary school to adult learners. Koeno Gravemeijer discusses educational modelling through five case studies of the creation of instructional materials. The next article is especially relevant while Education is being so heavily impacted by COVID19, Erin Gibson and colleagues exemplify and evaluate the design strategies used to transform in-person education materials for health professional for remote use.
Kevin Reins describes his experiences over a decade using modified lesson study with pre-service teacher education students. Finally, Hugh Burkhardt and Daniel Pead provide a sweeping taxonomy of 30 design strategies and tactics that have proved effective for curriculum material development at the Shell Centre of Mathematical Education. Strategies are described and linked to illustrative examples.
We thank the authors, the editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their hard work. After five years, Dr Sheila Evans, is stepping down from being our Assistant Editor. We especially thank Sheila for all her work and we wish her well for the future. Expressions of interest for the Assistant Editor are now being called for. Please contact Kaye Stacey at if you may be interested.
Full submissions (by invitation) by 1st September 2020
Prize awarded and prizewinner talk Mid-November 2020
Nominations are also sought for The Bell Burkhardt Daro Shell Centre Awards for early-career educational designers. See https://www.isdde.org/2020-prizes-call-for-nominations/ for more information. These “Early designer” awards particularly aim to support the work of early career educational designers and build our design community.
Next ISDDE Conference: Nottingham, UK – Delayed to 2021
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 conference has been moved to Fall 2021, when the ISDDE annual conference will return to the UK and visits for the first time the home of the Shell Centre, at The University of Nottingham.
Check in to the conference section of the ISDDE website in January to learn more.
Educational Designer 12 – March 2019
The latest issue of ISDDE’s free, online journal Educational Designer is now available at www.educationaldesigner.org. This issue contains four contributions related to the third goal of ISDDE: to increase increasing our impact on educational practice.
Hugh Burkhardt has analysed the problem of making impact and the reasons for it. Moreover, he has developed a model to present to policy makers and their advisors to alleviate it.
Zalman Usiskin’s 2017 ISDDE Lifetime Achievement Award recognised the substantial impact that his work has had on practice. His paper intertwines themes of the beauty and deep interconnections in mathematics with serendipity in his long career.
Berenice Michels and Harrie Eijkelhof describe the creation of ‘Nature, Life and Technology’ an interdisciplinary STEM upper secondary subject in Netherlands. They discuss the substantive and procedural principles used during the design and development, and reflect on their success.
Tobin White, Corey Brady, Jason Huang & Michael Stevens are designing tools to support student participation in mathematically rich collaborative activities. They describe three variations of their ‘Distributed by Design’ approach, distributing mathematical objects, or representational views, or mathematical tools which students must coordinate to complete a shared task.
If you would like to contribute to a future Educational Designer please start by reading the guide to contributors – then feel free to contact the editors for further advice.
The conference theme, Design for the Future, highlighted the new emerging challenges in STEM educational design, connecting to Pittsburgh’s long-standing focus on technology and education.
Continuing traditions set by previous conferences, the meeting was intimate and highly participatory by design. Attendees, top educational STEM designers from throughout the world, enjoyed inspirational plenary talks, presentations/poster showcases focusing on new educational designs or special challenges to educational design, small group work sessions on pressing problems of practice, and many meals and informal conversations over food and drink; this was not your usual conference in format or focus. The conference took place at the University of Pittsburgh in the emerging phoenix of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The 2018 ISDDE Prize for Excellence in Educational Design – Nick Jackiw
This year’s prize for a single product that has had great impact in terms of educational design was awarded to Nick Jackiw who developed the innovative software The Geometer’s Sketchpad. This, in many ways, ground breaking software has changed the way students, teachers and explorers see and come to understand the world of geometry. The software has had impact across the world and notably in the United States where many teachers have been genuinely been surprised and delighted at the way it supports their teaching and student learning. Read more
Applying for Membership and Fellowship
We have clarified the criteria and procedures for becoming a Member or Fellow, and updated the constitution accordingly.
