Shamila Janakiraman, an assistant professor in the College of Education (COE) Department of Learning Design and Technology (LTEC), was presented with an Outstanding Research Paper Award by an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group (SIG) during the annual AERA meeting, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in early April.
Co-author of the winning paper, The Process of Developing a Digital Repository for Online Teaching Using Design-Based Research, Janakiraman says her team undertook this project with a focus on the development of open educational resources (OERs) in response to the need for training graduate students and faculty on how to teach online, not just from a technological viewpoint but from a pedagogical perspective.
The Purdue Repository for Online Teaching and Learning (PoRTAL) was developed as an OER for graduate students and faculty in higher education settings to enhance their online teaching skills and strategies. The team identified problems faced by instructors who struggled with or were new to online teaching from a Human Performance Technology (HPT) standpoint. They then created resources for online teaching and embedded their research within practical activities to further study their design process.
Janakiraman’s team’s efforts resulted in an HPT-OER Model for Designing Digital Repositories. Their paper shares the DBR process they used to develop an OER repository within an HPT model.
“This recognition is a validation of the effort we undertook to develop the OERs and to capture the process in the form of a DBR study,” Janakiraman said. “We are hoping that the process described in this paper would facilitate future activities and research studies that are aimed at creating digital repositories of resources in the learning design and technology field.”
With the COE since 2023, Janakiraman has been involved with AERA since 2017.
“This project was started in 2018 when I was a PhD student at Purdue University and completed in 2021, along with an added tier 2 component, when I was a visiting faculty at Purdue University,” Janakiraman said. “Although we started this project in pre COVID times, its usefulness was felt acutely during the pandemic. The PoRTAL resources have been downloaded several thousand times by users across the globe.”
