Building an orchestrable tool to help teachers design and conduct collaborative ER diagramming activities

The design of educational tools tends to focus on students’ learning, giving less importance to the role of the teacher. The design of these tools often does not allow teachers to adapt the technology according to their learning designs. This means that the designer may impose pedagogical approaches to teachers. This is a problem as it does not offer teachers the flexibility they need to make an effective use of the technology for their courses. A promising approach to address this problem is the metaphor of orchestrable technology, which poses that teachers should be allowed to tune the tool so it can be adapted to their activity designs. This paper describes our work in progress in the context of small group Entity-Relationship (ER) diagramming. We present Hecoder, a learning tool that allows the teacher to design tasks, organise groups, monitor student’s work, provide feedback and assess the final outcomes. The paper examines the design implications of our system; presents preliminary results of using Hecoder in an authentic classroom; and provides insights about our future strands of research using Hecoder and other collaboration tools.