Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaborative Online Learning Spaces through Sociomateriality in Cape Town, South Africa

With the rapid adoption of online learning spaces since the advent of COVID-19, more and more calls are being made in higher education to move from emergency remote teaching and learning to appropriate online education. Although much has been written about the designing of online learning from both a technological and pedagogical perspective, limited contemporary literature is available to understand the complexity of interdisciplinary collaborative online learning. This limitation is investigated in this paper that reports on the first iteration of a Design-Based Research (DBR) study. Within this iteration, a qualitative exploratory research design that applies an inductive approach between researchers from Information Systems (IS) and Urban Planning (URP) is discussed. The aim was to develop design principles for interdisciplinary collaborative online learning spaces. This paper reports on the data generated during a semester-long, inter-institutional, interdisciplinary student project that was embedded in co-creating social digital innovations for pressing environmental problems faced by marginalised communities in Cape Town, South Africa. The participants for this study are 38 Honours degree IS students and 22 Advanced Diploma URP students (N=60). Participants, individually and in groups, completed a total of three reflective structured questionnaires using Google Forms during the semester that generated the dataset for this paper. The theoretical framing that underpins this research study is sociomateriality. The attraction to sociomateriality is its ability to not merely shift attention from the human to the non-human but rather a focus on entanglements and the interrelated nature of components that constitute the learning space. This focus on entanglements is needed for an understanding of the complexities associated with interdisciplinary collaborative online learning. Engaging this complex learning space through the data has revealed four design principles namely: (1) creating immersive context-sensitive learning experiences, (2) designing opportunities to collaboratively (co)-construct knowledge, (3) focusing on the intra-action of socio-technical and socio-cultural entanglements and (4) foregrounding relationality as a tool to foster agency. It is argued in this paper that the aforementioned design principles are necessary for developing interdisciplinary collaborative online learning spaces that afford students a complex learning experience. Complex learning is considered fundamental in developing abilities in students to appropriately respond to the myriad 21st-century societal challenges that await.