User Experience Design af Datavisualiseringer til Pædagogisk kontekst: Et kandidatspeciale i Generel Pædagogik

The impact of digital learning materials has never been more substantial and along with the increase of usage of educational digital technologies the power of student data has formed its own agenda in the landscape of learning materials.
This thesis analyzes the UX Design of data visualization in educational contexts. First by employing a phenomenological framework, the purpose of this study was to investigate the first-person experiences of UX Designers on the phenomenon “data visualization designs for educational practices”. Semi-structured interviews with UX Designers were used to generate rich and detailed descriptions of the phenomenon. Secondly, based on theories on the distinction between learning and education by Biesta and educational antinomies by Oettingen, the empirical basis of the thesis was analyzed in order to examine the role of UX Design of data visualization and its responsibility towards impacting the educational context.
The conclusions of the analysis show, that UX Designers have a strong role in developing not only the design for the data visualizations, but also forming the purpose and the ramifications of the data needed in the visualizations. The UX Designers describe themselves as being responsible for both the intended, the implemented and the evaluating level of the product development and the closer to the educational context they are in their everyday work life, the humbler and more obliged they feel about this role and pedagogical responsibility. They define the pedagogical context as being special compared to other contexts they have designed for. Also, from an overall pedagogical perspective it shows, that the databased features in digital learning materials, like data visualizations, has a great impact on the way we prioritize and value learning over education, both in the way we create new databased solutions in digital educational technologies and in the way we discuss the pedagogical purposes of school in general. The study shows, that underlying values in the databased features towards a quantitative learning perspective has a great impact on, how we only measure and therefore value, what we are able to measure instead of ensuring that we measure all that we value pedagogically, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
This leads to the author of this thesis to suggest a new problem area for pedagogical practice in addition to Oettingens four existing problem areas, concerning the means we use for teaching purposes and in that connection also suggesting a new field of research called Educational User Experience Design. A field that solemnly aims for researching this specific problem area and considers the special domain the educational fields is, especially when it comes to forming the digital development and making meaningful use of databased solutions in an educational context.