Designing learning environments for the VUCA world. : Educators' perceptions.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the educators’ experiences in designing learning environments that activate the high education students to prepare for future working life in the VUCA world. VUCA is an acronym that refers to a rapidly changing environment that has been described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. This study aims to widen our understanding of the educators’ perceptions and opinions toward working as an educator for enabling student learning in learning environments that apply at least some level of innovation pedagogy. Based on the educators’ working experiences, the aim is to identify different profiles of educators and investigate what they evaluate as important issues in designing such learning environments. Four designable elements of learning environments are applied to this study: epistemic elements, spatial and instrumental elements, social elements, and temporal elements (ESIST). Finally, the aim is to recognize the differences in important issues between the profiles. As for the methods, this study employs a survey for data collection and quantitative analysis of the data that consists of 154 educators’ responses from five high education institutions and 13 learning environments in them, in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain to the online questionnaire. As a result, three educator profiles were identified: the More negative experiences profile, the Mixed experiences profile, and the More positive experiences profile. The representants of the More negative experiences agreed more often with adjectives of a negative character: stressing, confusing, uncertain, and insufficient in evaluating their working in the focal learning environment, while the representatives of the More positive experiences profile agreed more often with adjectives that can be described as positive: motivational, meaningful, rewarding as well as enhancing their competence as an educator. The representatives of the Mixed experiences profile disagreed more often with all the adjectives, both the negative and the positive ones. In general, in evaluating the importance of the ESIST elements, these educators agreed most with some of the epistemic and social elements. In addition, some spatial and instrumental elements were highly agreed but the most disagreed were in evaluating the importance of the temporal elements in designing a learning environment. Finally, the differences in perceptions of important issues of ESIST in designing a learning environment varied among the three different profiles in some of the issues. The greatest differences were between the More positive experiences profile and the More negative experiences profile, e.g., in temporal elements (the importance of pushing students to work under pressure in terms of time; giving starting and ending dates for students but keeping the schedule open) and epistemic elements (the importance of avoiding providing clear patterns for students how to solve the tasks/assignments; the new variable of Instability of knowing that consisted from four epistemic element statements). In addition, there were differences between the educators representing both the More Positive experiences profile and the More negative experiences profile, and the Mixed experiences profile, e.g., in social elements: the importance of giving room for turbulence in team dynamic during the work process and in spatial and instrumental elements: the importance of mirroring a professional workplace at the university with a specially furnished lab, clinic, or office, although the number of participants in the Mixed experiences profile was quite low. However, it is remarkable to notice that in all the evaluated statements that differed between the More positive and the two other profiles, the scores of the More positive profile were lower than in the other profiles. To sum up, based on the data of this study, it can be concluded that there are different experiences of educators in what they find important in designing a learning environment for the VUCA world.