D-Move: Ten Years Experience with a Learning Environment for Digital Natives

D-Move is a learning environment for Digital Natives, composed of different software modules and learning methods, mainly based on constructivist-connectivist learning theories. Digital Natives have the Internet as their mother tongue and probably require different learning approaches. D-Move started more than ten years ago with the aim to reach learning objectives in settings that are part of Digital Natives’ everyday life. The article shows the results of three different phases: Text messaging, multi-channel support and finally, expansion by a Delphi-based research environment. 1 CHALLENGES FOR DIGITAL NATIVES’ LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Digital Natives’ mother tongue is the Internet and the digital language of computers (Jones 2011). They are born after 1980 and are raised with digital technologies. They are used to obtaining information quickly, possess a high amount of ad-hoccommunication, work and communicate in form of multitasking and use mostly interactive digital media. As a consequence, new challenges for learning environments evolve to support them. To design the learning environment D-Move we identified five key challenges: Increasing Amount of Information Digital Natives are faced with a much higher amount of information than their parents. Furthermore, distinguishing between important and less important information is becoming more and more difficult. Thus, only providing more information is viewed by Digital Natives not only as useless but even as harmful (BITKOM 2014). One important way to solve this is to move from pure consumption of broadcasted information such as in television or traditional lectures to self-directed acquirement of knowledge and competencies by acting in the real world (Klippert 1999). Increasing Need for Authenticity The strongly increased amount of information sources lead to greater difficulties in verifying the source of information. Search engines, used as the main information source of Digital Natives, deliver a vast amount of information but verifying them leads to discomfort and uncertainty. Thus, the need for authenticity of information sources increases. One strategy to reach this goal is to obtain the information and knowledge in real world practice or at least in learning environments that are perceived as being close to reality (Linten 2009). From Lean Back to Lean Forward More and more Digital Natives prefer lean forward media with a high amount of personal engagement and interactivity. They like to create content by themselves in form of pictures and videos, posts or comments and share them within their social media networks. Thus, they take over core competencies from traditional information sources like newspapers or television as well as lectures at a university (Tapscott und Williams 2008). This active role of Digital Natives in learning processes are based on co-production of learning content in highly engaged social processes (Lee und McLoughlin 2010, Alur et al. 2002). One outcome of this development is a high demand for lean forward functionalities of learning environments to co-produce and share learning content by the learners in real world settings.