Introduction

In the last two years, the academic environment has witnessed a lot of changes due to the covid-
19 pandemic, which ranges from redefining educational policies to implementing and redesigning
learning spaces. Learning spaces over the last decade were primarily and significantly the classrooms,
although, libraries and faculty offices amongst other spaces were frequently utilized (Brown, 2022).
This has changed over time in response to technological advancement and the impact has been felt with
the digitization of learning environments and subsequent educational platforms. There have been a lot
of changes recorded with the use of the World Wide Web a major milestone, and learning activities have
shifted from the classroom to online spaces with a significant level of success. Attention has been on
the educational platforms and their digitization, and, the recent covid-19 pandemic coupled with its
affiliate social distancing which resulted in the shutting down of schools, has laid greater emphasis on
it (Decuypere, Grimaldi & Landri, 2020). This era has exposed the limitations of these platforms, and
how they are redefining educational systems, hence attention is being focused on their design and
redesign.
A learning platform simply is an information system that provides students with a safe learning
environment where they can take online courses. The main sources of these learning environments in
both private and public schools have over the last decade been successively dominated by both local and
global technology companies (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Following the Covid-19 outbreak, the world has
witnessed a surge in the application and utilization of digital learning platforms and the related novel
‘emergency pedagogies’ that sprung from the surviving and evolving digital educational platforms
(Williamson et al., 2020). It is, therefore, no news that educational practices are changing forms with
the ascendancy of digital platforms (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020; Lewis, 2020) and the switch
between online and offline learning is a new paradigm that the researcher opines will be crucial in
ensuring accurate instructional delivery. A critical observer is tempted to ask what role instructors,
preceptors, teachers, pedagogues, and even curriculum planners play in the design of educational
platforms in this new era since the design is mainly in the hands of major technology companies.
Robertson (2019), reported that no remarkably evaluative educational research has been carried
out on the performance of platforms and how they are part of an extensive socio-technical assemblage,
that must be in the process of significantly transforming the educational sector (Decuypere, Grimaldi &
Landri, 2020b). Although Decuypere (2021), examined how platforms reflect the assembling of
instructional contents, connecting artifacts, actors, epistemologies, techniques, and values into novel
educational forms, however, lecturers who design the curriculum and mode of instruction and play a
specific role in the delivery is not duly emphasized. Therefore, this research is seeking to unravel what
role instructors play in the design of platform learning content and how they beget the expected learning
outcome in a quantifiable way.
The purpose of this study is to critically investigate the role lecturers in KU Leuven play in the
designing of online learning content. The researcher aims to direct this topic to one that has a theoretical
backing and create consciousness of the need for institutions to partner with tech companies in the design
of online content. This will preserve the expected learning outcomes while ensuring that content
designers follow the formal processes of instructional design. The research applies a grounded theory
approach to gain insight into the research phenomenon through qualitative analysis of data obtained
from interviews with lecturers.
This study falls into the broader field of qualitative research which seeks to understand how
people experience the world by engaging a process of inquiry, that seeks an understanding of a social or
human problem built on clear-cut methodological traditions of investigation (Creswell, 2013). The need
to understand the role of instructors in the design of platform architecture in a world recently hit by the
covid-19 pandemic cannot be overemphasized. Therefore, understanding how the contents are
determined requires an investigation that incorporates collecting and analyzing non-numerical data
through observation, interviews, focus on groups, and surveys. These are all tenets of qualitative
research that the researcher employs in this study.
Finally, the thought integration mechanism constituting the conceptual framework on which this
study is designed, includes core constructs such as changing academic identities, teachers’ roles in
platform architecture design, hybrid learning, and determination of online platform contents. The
experiences of lecturers and students are postulated from the theoretical framework constructed by the
review of related literature and linked to the research interest. The research interest is defined by the
research problem. This in turn determines the research questions and the methods of data collection and
analysis applied. The final report is drafted from the aforementioned and all of these are linked back to
the theoretical framework.