Designing a Mobile-Messaging App-Based Teachers’ Community of Practice in India

Abstract

A mobile-based messaging app (MMA) was implemented as a teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context through a large-scale educational initiative. The development process adopted a Design-based Research approach to test underlying theories in real-world settings. The researchers theorised the pedagogical affordances of the MMA Telegram using Davis and Chouinard's theoretical framework of affordances, defined as a relational process among users, designers, the environment, and the artefact. This paper discusses the iterative design process in detail. The findings showed that the MMA encourages accessibility and for teachers to showcase their practice in the online community of practice and refuses (does not allow) the development of the online community of practice as an epistemic community.

Keywords

teacher professional development community of practice mobile messaging app design-based research pedagogical affordances

Introduction

This Design-Based Research (henceforth DBR) study was part of a larger action research¹ aimed at studying teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context. The action research intended to understand the nature of learning and knowledge construction of a social learning system by inquiring into the functional and theoretical aspects of an online Community of Practice (henceforth CoP) for professional teacher learning and continuous professional development in the Indian context. The action research study was located within the larger context of the Connected Learning Initiative (henceforth CLIx)^. This large-scale initiative worked with students and teachers in four² Indian states. CLIx aimed to transform learning experiences in government secondary schools in India's rural districts (CLIx, 2020), where most underserved, socially and economically marginalised children attend schools. This action research specifically studied secondary school mathematics teachers teaching in rural contexts in the southern state of Telangana, India. The fieldwork spanned two school academic years (two action research cycles, 2017–18 & 2018–19). It included developing and managing (facilitating learning) the mobile-based CoP and studying teachers’ usage and experiences participating in the CoP. The fieldwork included real-time and virtual engagement with teachers, including interactions on the CoP, facilitating district workshops, visiting schools and classrooms and interacting with teachers, head teachers and students. At the end of cycle one of the action research, the Telangana mathematics teachers CoP had 436 members, and at the end of cycle two, the membership count was 271. This paper describes one part of the action research study: the development of the online teacher CoP using a DBR approach, and reports the findings.

CLIx Continuous Professional Development (CPD)

The CPD framework developed in CLIx is based on the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCTE, 2009) and the CLIx-CPD programme design for teachers (Thirumalai et al., 2019). Specifically, the CLIx-CPD framework aims to develop teachers as reflective practitioners by providing teachers with a connected learning experience (Thirumalai et al., 2019, pp. 247–249). CLIx-CPD aimed to leverage ICT meaningfully to deliver professional development opportunities, including creating online CoPs and offering short courses in a blended model to address scale and diversity with depth and rigour of learning. The CoP was considered the key social space in which teacher learning would take place. A series of short courses were designed and offered over 12 weeks to build learning communities that extend over time. Each modular course³ aimed to support teachers in implementing exemplar open curricular modules created by CLIx for students in their classrooms. They were designed to facilitate teachers in inquiring into their practice and building theoretical understanding. The modular courses adopted a practice-based learning approach, and teachers were required to implement the CLIx student modules in their classrooms and submit a reflective report. The CoP was designed to support teachers’ implementation of student modules in their classrooms (See Figure 1).

Figure 1.

CLIx teacher professional development (TPD), 2017.

Methodology

The development of the mobile-based CoP involved iterative designing, testing and development through a DBR approach (DBRC, 2013) to put into practice the underlying theories of online discussion forums and pedagogical affordances of a mobile-messaging app as a social learning tool through the artefacts created in a real-world setting (Cobb et al., 2003). In this research, the intention was to understand how teachers use and interact with the tool and the learning environment designed based on available theories on technological aspects of forming online CoPs. The specific research questions asked were, 1) what are the pedagogical affordances of an MMA teacher CoP in the Indian context? 2) In what ways did the DBR approach support or facilitate the realisation of mobile-based CoP? This research used Štemberger and Cencič's (2014) four phases of the DBR process for analysis. The first phase involved an analysis of the problem in collaboration with researchers and practitioners. In the second phase, the innovation design involved finding a technical solution for the problem. The third phase entailed multiple iterative cycles of testing and refining the innovation. Finally, the fourth phase involved reflection on developing the innovation and arriving at design principles.

The development of the MMA CoP included the participation of over 1900 government secondary school teachers teaching in rural and some remote locations across four states in India. The development also included the participation of approximately 50 CLIx field team members, over 15 subject experts, and university faculty. This study used qualitative methods to understand how teachers adopted the CoP design and the affordances of the MMA while participating in the CoP. A mix of quantitative and qualitative data, formal and informal data collection methods including face-to-face interactions, meeting notes, field observations, and online CoP data were used to answer the research questions.

Three main data sources (see Table 1) were used, namely, CoP virtual meeting notes, a summary of members & their posts on Telegram groups and free-flowing notes of personal interactions with teachers. Twenty-five meetings were held between July 2017 and March 2018 in which CLIx field team members, university faculty and the CoP design team participated, recording the usage of each CoP and field experience across four states. The researcher took detailed meeting notes of all discussions for each meeting and recorded the decisions, which were later collated into a tabular form for further analysis. The researcher kept a weekly spreadsheet record of the number of members in the CoP and the number of posts by teachers for every Telegram channel and group to record CoP usage quantitatively. Finally, free-flowing field notes were maintained of all personal conversations between the researcher and teachers that took place during workshops and virtually over the messaging App related to the usage of the CoP. Analysis of these three data sources, both qualitative and quantitative, enabled the researcher to understand teachers’ perceptions of the design and usage of the CoP in their real context.

Table 1.

Research Sites, Fieldwork, Data and Tools.

Site	Focal Agents / Activities	Tool & Types of Data	Analysis Plan
CoP Meetings (Virtual) 25 meetings between July 2017 and March 2018.	Focal Agents - CLIx Field Team, university faculty and CoP design team meeting decisions Action - Running the meetings	Meeting notes	DBR - Qualitative analysis of feedback on design and design decisions
Spreadsheet Summary of activity. CoP (Virtual) Data from April 2017 to May 2019	Focal Agents - Individual teachers; other CoP managers Action – Recording weekly quantitative summaries of members and posts generated	Quantitative data of weekly activity on CoP	DBR - Quantitative analysis of CoP activity
Free-flowing Field Notes	Focal Agents – Individual Teachers Action - Free-flowing notes	Conversations between the researcher and teachers (in-person during workshops) and virtual (personal interactions on Telegram)	DBR – Qualitative analysis of perceptions of CoP usage

Results

The Telegram^TM CoP Design in a Snapshot

Four iterations of designs were based on teachers’ feedback, and participation in the MMA (Telegram) CoP led to four versions (See Figure 2) of the Telegram CoP design. As the implementation was staggered in the four states, all the design iterations were completed in one academic year, 2017–2018. Version 4 emerged at the end of cycle one and was the sound design used in cycle two of the action research. The first version of the Telegram CoP design was course-based and included a channel and a set of groups; each group was meant to discuss each unit of learning designed in the modular courses. In the second version, the multiple groups were collapsed into a single group. The channel was no longer used for the CoPs, which led to version 3 of the design. The two course-based CoPs were collapsed into one Telegram CoP group based on the teacher's subject domain in the final version.

Figure 2.

Design iterations of the Telegram mobile messaging app functioning as a teacher’s community of practice.

Four versions or design iterations emerged from the DBR process by testing the design on the field. The decision tree (see Figure 3) depicts decisions based on the field test of the design. Version 1⁴ was designed like a discussion forum, and the multiple groups representing each unit of the modular course were created to function as a discussion thread. The channel was designed to broadcast posts and prompts from the university. However, we found that less than 10 per cent (Thirumalai et al., 2019) of the teachers engaged in the courses, and the majority joined just the Unit1 group of the Telegram CoP. As teachers were not accessing the courses on TISSx⁵, a Telegram bot - MiTibot,⁶ was designed by the CLIx team and included in the Telegram group CoPs to access course content and discussion prompts to encourage course-based discussions in Version 2. Low channel membership and virtually no course-based discussions further simplified the design in Version 3, where each course-based CoP consisted of only one Telegram group, and the channel was no longer used. MiTibot continued to function in the groups to encourage teachers to access course content. Finally, once teachers were members of both the C01 and S02 course groups, English language, mathematics and science teachers’ engagement in the C01 group became low. Most teachers were interested in participating in discussions around the subjects they were teaching, and general technology-based discussions virtually stopped in the C01-based CoPs. The decision to continue with one subject-based Telegram group as a teacher's CoP to continue to engage in practice-based discussions was made, and the final design, Version 4, emerged as a result.

Figure 3.

Telegram CoP Design – Decision Tree.

This section provided a snapshot of the four iterations of the Telegram CoP and the decision points that emerged based on teachers’ usage and field-level data. The next section presents a detailed description and analysis of the design process.

Phase 1 Analysis and Collaboration

In this phase, the educational and technological considerations were integrated to select an appropriate technology for use as an online teacher CoP. In 2016, we found that teachers struggled to engage in discussions through text during the programme's pilot phase, where we used Moodle for course delivery and the discussion forums on Moodle as the CoP. Discussion threads introduced on Moodle discussion forums did not evolve into meaningful discussions, and teacher exchanges were limited to interactions during the workshops. Once the workshops were completed, teachers did not interact on the Moodle discussion forums, so all communication between faculty and teachers stopped. There was thus a problem of planning an extended CoP that would support teachers implementing the CLIx student modules throughout the academic year, which depended on accessing a computer and using the discussion forum in the learning management system. The strategy that there would be tasks in the course designed to bring teachers onto the discussion forum in Moodle did not work.

Our workshop experiences showed that most participating teachers had ready access to mobile devices and were actively participating in MMAs, in social and other professional settings rather than browser-based discussion forums (Thirumalai & Kumar, 2016). Teachers were also found to have overall low digital literacy levels in the CLIx baseline study of teachers (Chandran & Roy, 2017). Overall, access to the Internet was mainly through mobile smartphones. The failure of the learning management discussion forum to create a CoP led to a decision to use an MMA as the online CoP, notwithstanding the groups’ concern that mobile phones are generally better as consumption devices and that ‘teacher as producer’ may be compromised. Another concern was that integrating the CoP with ongoing professional development modular courses may be complicated. Different platforms and devices were used for the two experiences: mobile and a mobile application for the CoP and a computer and learning management system (TISSx) for the modular course. Nevertheless, it was decided at the intervention level that the threshold for accessing a convenient social application was paramount and prioritised over other considerations. Three considerations guided this decision:

Finding a way to stay ‘in touch’ with teachers after the workshop in a social forum was imperative.

The intervention depended on teachers having to bear the costs of their engagement–by bringing their device and access to data/bandwidth to access the Internet–neither computers nor data plans were provided to teachers.

The teachers’ engagement time with the community and learning resources could not be limited to only school hours, and a strategy needed to be in place so that teachers could access the CoP at their convenience, even after school hours and on weekends.

The use of mobile smartphones has become ubiquitous in the Indian context. The recent availability of mobile data connectivity at affordable costs has made Internet access via smartphones widespread in India. The accessibility and affordability of smartphones with mobile data connectivity have prompted many varied uses of mobile-based applications to support different types of professional development opportunities for teachers leveraging the portability, ubiquity and convenience of a mobile device (Sharples et al., 2009 in Baran (2014)).

The ‘Telegram’ MMA was adopted as a teachers’ online community of practice and a learning tool. Telegram was selected among other MMAs for three main reasons. First, Telegram is an open-source app. The privacy policy states that it does not use personal data for advertising and that mobile phone numbers are not available to other group members unless shared by the individual member. Telegram does not have the features of backing up secret chats or the self-destructing message feature for groups. We were using the chats for professional conversations and research purposes; hence, backup of secret chats was not a desired feature. Additionally, we did not want any of the messages to be deleted from the group; hence, the self-destructing message feature was also not desirable. Second, the Telegram App is a cloud-based messenger; media posted on the groups is not automatically downloaded on individual phone devices, thus enabling access to the CoP for teachers with low-storage devices. Finally, data at the backend was free to download for research purposes (Telegram, 2019).

Phase 2 Finding a Technical Solution

During cycle one of this action research study (i.e., 2017–2018), the design of the mobile-based CoP went through four iterations of changes. The design team met weekly to review and plan the design of the intervention's first iteration (see Version 1 in Figure 2). As features of the CoP were planned, the team discussed problems that could be anticipated and proposed features and made the following decisions:

Multiple spaces/platforms for discussions/discussion fora: As both the discussion forum feature of TISSx and Telegram are platforms for discussions, it was anticipated that having both active would lead to confusion. Therefore, it was decided to disable the discussion forum on TISSx and conduct all discussions only on the Telegram CoP.

Connecting professional development activities on TISSx with the discussion forum on Telegram: With the decision to put all discussions on a different platform (Telegram) and a different device (mobile phone) from that of the professional development modular courses on the TISSx platform and access ideally from a computer, it was anticipated that these two devices and two different platforms would pose a barrier to usage. We anticipated that teachers might not automatically make a move to a new platform, and to get them to make this move between TISSx and Telegram, we inserted ‘prompts’ (see Figure 4). Whenever the course had a discussion component, the Telegram Icon was used alongside the discussion prompt to indicate to participants to manually shift to the Telegram CoP and post their opinions on the discussion topic.

Figure 4.

Call to Telegram from the TISSx modular courses.

Building a community needs a commonality of focus/purpose: It was envisioned that a common focus and purpose for a community would be developed around teaching and integrating ICT-based CLIx student modules. Subject teachers in a state would form the community. Hence a Telegram CoP was designed for each course, as seen in Figure 2.

Separating administrative information from the professional discussion: Based on reports (GoI, 2011) of physical CoP discussions that matters about administration tended to dominate over professional discussions, it was anticipated that there might be a similar problem in our case, as the community was being built around the delivery of a course. Hence it was decided to separate into two channels of communication. Teachers were also enrolled into a course-wise one-way ‘broadcast channel’ where matters of programme administration would be shared to address administrative requirements separately.

Designing a ‘discussion forum’ on Telegram: The core technological design principle of the CoP was to make it function as a ‘discussion forum’. A discussion forum is critical if knowledge generation is a crucial objective (Andresen, 2009) of the CoP. Discussion forums technically work on the principles of threads. Discussion threads enable discussions to be organised by topic and enable ‘nested’ dialogue in which one can comment on specific posts regardless of chronological order and see the discussion progress in a nested rather than linear, chronological fashion. Discussions organised around topics form the practical knowledge generated by teachers. When such discussions and responses are easily retrievable, they become the practical knowledgebase generated by teachers and organised around specific topics that the community can access at any time. Reich (2014) distinguishes between two types of discussions: authoritative and discursive. Based on his experience with the Edx platform discussion forums, he notes how technical design decisions impact technology-mediated learning and pedagogy (See Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Authoritative and discussion forums (Responses are numbered in chronological orders).

In his blog, the researcher examines how more discursive discussions need to have the post-replying feature more deeply nested when compared to authoritative discussion threads. The first version of the CoP groups (that all members can post on) was organised as an authoritative discussion forum. The idea was to design each Telegram group as a discussion thread for each unit learning in the course. It was envisioned that the discussions pertaining to each unit would be a repository of the teacher's practical knowledge for the unit's study topic and work like a discussion thread. We also realised that a discursive design would not only be cumbersome to use but that the course prompts were also like questions attempting to elicit teachers’ responses and experiences related to the topic and hence more authoritative. One Telegram group was created for each unit of study in the modular course (See version 1 in Figure 2).

Phase 3 Iterations and Refinements

During phase 3, three more iterations and versions of the Telegram CoP emerged based on testing the design during workshops in the four states of the CLIx intervention. To facilitate the DBR process and manage the various CoPs, the CoP design team conducted weekly online meetings with the course faculty and the field teams attending the calls.

Version 1 of the design was implemented in Mizoram in April 2017 and in Chhattisgarh in June 2017. In the workshops, we found that most teachers were already familiar with using the mobile-based messaging App WhatsApp; therefore, they did not find it challenging to start using the Telegram CoP. However, the field team in Chhattisgarh and Mizoram reported ‘confusion’ among teachers about the channel and multiple group design, and many teachers joined only the first group (for Unit 1 discussions related to the course) and did not join the channel (see Table 2).

Table 2.

2017 Membership Numbers in Chhattisgarh and Mizoram CoPs.

State	CoP Channel & Group Name	Number of Teachers who participated in the workshop	Number of CoP Members
Mizoram	MZC01 Introduction to ICT in Education (Channel)	164	13
Workshops for teachers started in April 2017	MZC01 Unit 1 (Group)		*63
	MZC01 Unit 2 & 3		16
	MZC01 Unit 4 5 & 6		12
Chhattisgarh	CGC01 Introduction to ICT in Education (Channel)	72	19
Workshop for teachers started in June 2017	CGC01 Unit 1 (Group)		**78
	CGC01 Unit 2 & 3		21
	CGC01 Unit 4 5 & 6		7

*This number was higher during the workshops; many teachers deleted Telegram once the workshops were completed. It is not possible to compile membership by date/time.

**Some teachers who were part of the pilot intervention in 2016 were members of the CoP but did not attend the workshop

Out of the 63 teachers who continued to engage in the Telegram CoP after the workshops, only 13 teachers joined the channel, and 16 and 12 teachers joined the other units. Similarly, out of the 78 teachers who remained members of the Telegram CoP, only 19 teachers joined the channel, and 21 and 7 teachers joined the other units. As a result, there was virtually no participation in the other units; all teacher interactions and posts took place in the Unit 1 group. A similar experience occurred in Rajasthan in August 2017; however accurate membership data was not tracked for Rajasthan. On July 7, 2017 (based on meeting notes), a decision was made to maintain only one group for each course.

A weekly tracker of engagement on TISSx courses was compiled. Between April and July 2017, we observed that very few teachers (less than 10%) (Thirumalai et al., 2019) continued to engage in modular courses online after the workshops in the states. Some discussion prompts from the course were reposted directly on the Telegram CoP channel; however, these discussions did not elicit any responses. We hypothesised that the posted discussion prompts without teachers engaging in the course content would not be relevant to teachers. We also speculated that, as the TISSx platform was accessible on computers, many teachers would not access the courses. We developed a Telegram bot called MiTibot to make the course content (without the interactive elements and assessments) available on Telegram and accessible on mobile. Version 2 of the design emerged as a result of the decision. Version 2 was the design adopted in Telangana, where the workshop implementation began in September 2017.

Version 3 emerged from the field and usage by the CLIx field team. No formal decisions were taken to change the design, the CLIx team members gradually stopped using the channels, and all administrative notices were posted directly on the Telegram groups. However, for the Telangana mathematics teacher's CoP, we continued to use the channel to post notices and prompts and forwarded these posts from the channel to the Telegram group. The channel enabled us to keep a chronological list of prompts and notices posted. Forwarding the messages through the channel enabled tracking the number of views received by the prompt/notice on the groups.

Similarly, we observed that once teachers became members of the subject course groups, the C01 course group interactions with all subject teachers reduced significantly. In all states except Telangana, there was no activity on the respective C01 Telegram groups. In October 2017, we began a new batch of engagement with the Chhattisgarh Navodaya Vidyalaya (residential schools that the central government manages). At about the same time, an Android App was developed to access the TISSx platform on mobile. A decision was taken to create subject-based CoPs, one for English language, mathematics and science, instead of course-based CoPs. During the summer vacations, a decision was taken to manage only the subject-based CoP groups in the new academic year 2018–19. Version 4 of the Telegram CoP emerged as the stable design. Once the Telegram CoP became a subject-based CoP, the link between the modular courses on TISSx and the subject-based CoP was challenging to establish. It was essential to ensure that the courses provided a social learning experience; hence, the discussion forum on TISSx was enabled. Teachers were now participating in two CoPs, one on the TISSx platform that remained open for the course run (about 12 to 16 weeks) and a Telegram CoP with no termination plan when the course run was completed. As per the CLIx CPD plan, identified resource persons in each state were offered the modular course and engaged in both the CoPs, while teachers continued to engage on the Telegram CoP.

Phase 4 Reflections and Theorising

The DBR process enabled us to identify some pedagogical affordances of the Telegram CoP used as a social learning space. Davis and Chouinard (2016) theorise the concept of affordance as a relational process among users, designers, the environment and the artefact. The analysis involves understanding the features of the artefact vis-à-vis the intended design and its usage in specific contexts. Further, based on Evans et al. (as cited in the Davis and Chouinard (2016)) conceptual framework, affordances may be defined as a “variable process that mediates between properties of an artefact (features) and what subjects do with the properties of an artefact (outcomes)” (p242). In this conceptualisation, an affordance must be dynamic, not a feature or an outcome and depends on the context of the operation. Further conceptualising how affordances work, the authors (Davis & Chouinard, 2016) propose an analytical framework to understand how affordances operate through a gradated continuum, where artefacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse a subject's desired action in a particular context (See table 3 for an explanation of the framework for the Telegram app). While identifying the pedagogical affordances, we considered the Telegram messaging app as the artefact and the Telangana mathematics teacher's CoP as the subject.

Table 3.

Analytical Framework* on how Affordances Operate on Telegram App.

Bids that artefacts place on the subject	Description	MMA Telegram as a teacher's CoP
Request	The artefact recommends one type of action of the subject, but it is not required.	The Telegram App requests that a profile picture be added once signed in, but it is not required
Demand	The artefact demands one type of action of the subject, and there are no workarounds.	The Telegram App demands that a person accesses the App using a mobile phone number.
Encourage	Artefacts nudge a type of action by the subject and suppress other actions by design.	The Telegram App encourages access to different media posted on the group by organising media that are grouped by media type for easy access.
Discourage	Artefacts make a type of action complex to use by the subject by design.	The Telegram App discourages tracking the number of views of a prompt posted on a group. To achieve this, a prompt must be posted on the channel and forwarded from the channel to the group.
Refuse	The artefact does not allow certain use by the subject by design.	The Telegram App refuses access to the mobile numbers of other participants in a group.
Allow	Allow is neutral and multidirectional. Allow means that both artefacts and subjects generate bids.	The Telegram App allows access via a web browser.

*Adopting Davis and Chouinard's (2016) concept of affordances

The Telegram App requests a profile picture to be added once signed in, but it is not required. While the CLIx team and TISS faculty added their profile pictures, we noticed that most teachers did not use this option except for a few active teachers. The demand for having a mobile phone number was fulfilled as we noted that all teachers had access to mobile phones. A few teachers who did not have access to smart mobile devices were allowed to access the Telegram app through a browser, thus making the Telegram App universally accessible. The Telegram App encourages access to different media types, providing easy and separate access to media organised by the type of media. The Telegram App discourages tracking the number of views of a prompt posted on a group. The prompts were posted on the channel and forwarded to the group to track the number of views of prompts posted by the researcher (first author). As a part of the Telegram security policy, the App does not make (refuses) the mobile numbers of the group members visible unless the member is a saved contact. This feature was useful in preventing wide and open access to mobile numbers of faculty and teachers.

Accessibility The widespread use of mobile devices by teachers and the fact that they were already using other messaging apps for professional and social networking made the Telegram app accessible and easy to use. As shown in Table 4, the maximum type of media posted was photos.

Table 4.

Media Shared on CoP.

Media Type	Cycle 1: 2017–2018		Cycle 2: 2018–2019		Total
Media Type	Sep 2017 to Dec 2017	Jan 2018 to May 2018	June 2018 to Oct 2018	Nov 2018 to May 2019	Total
Photos	984	322	376	827	2509
Videos	0	1	2	3	6
Documents	20	10	10	14	54
Shared Links	45	4	21	21	91
Voice Messages	5	3	0	0	8
TOTAL	1054	340	409	865	2668

Media posted on the groups is not automatically downloaded on individual phone devices, which was a significant advantage as the number of artefacts posted, especially photos, was high, and most teachers have mobile phones with low storage. The groups’ media, photos, videos, audio, and documents are organised and accessible separately (see Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Artefacts organised for easy access on Telegram group.

The feature of the super-group available on Telegram enables large groups to be formed, and participants can invite other persons to join the group. The super-group feature was handy as many teachers invited their colleagues after the workshops were completed during the academic year. The Telegram app encourages accessibility for the Telangana mathematics teacher's CoP.

Showcasing practice: The ease of sharing multimedia – photos, videos, and audio files on the Telegram CoP combined with the accessibility of the device enabled horizontal (interaction among peers) and vertical (interaction between teachers, subject experts and teacher educators) linkages of professional learning in the online community of practice. Teachers used their mobile devices in the classrooms, took photos of students’ classroom activities, and showcased students’ work and other school activities. Teachers shared photos and videos taken on their mobile cameras, so teachers connected with their peers. The interactions in the CoP enabled teachers working in rural and remote school locations to share their issues of practice and implementation of the CLIx programme in schools and create a sense of continuity in the programme after the workshops despite the low participation in the online courses on TISSx. Hence ease of sharing multimedia, especially photos, was a vital feature for enabling the practice-based component of the modular courses, connecting teachers, teacher educators, and subject domain experts and making the teacher's practice public in the CoP. The Telegram App encourages teachers to showcase their practice by sharing their classroom teaching experiences, adopting research-based Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), using resources while teaching and using technology in the teaching-learning process in the CoP for the Telangana mathematics teacher's CoP.

Epistemic Community: The Telegram CoP was initially organised into a channel and multiple groups to incorporate discussion forums around each course unit. Teachers were encouraged to use the reply option on Telegram while commenting on posts of peers or faculty to thread the discussions. However, the DBR process showed that teachers found this design aspect too cumbersome and was not leveraged during implementation. While we tried several strategies, such as providing unique names to the discussion threads, using specific days and formats to initiate the discussion threads, and highlighting and drawing attention to the post, it failed to keep the discussion thread together. Teachers did not consistently reply to the discussion post while responding and instead created fresh posts to respond to. The non-conformity to norms made it difficult to keep a discussion thread alive over an extended period.

Additionally, the ability of the teachers to access a thread of discussion later is challenging. The access to the discussion forum threads is a repository of teachers’ practical knowledge generated by the community. Hence, in an interview, a teacher commented on how she compiled CoP discussions in a notebook to refer to later. Easy access to discussion threads is vital for an online CoP, especially as the community matures and discussion threads become an essential knowledge base for teachers’ practical knowledge to emerge as an epistemic community. In this regard, the Telegram App refuses the development of the Telangana mathematics teacher's CoP as an epistemic community.

Discussion

The iterative design process enabled us to understand many features of an online CoP for teachers in the Indian context, working in rural and remote locations. It also enabled a realistic understanding of what is feasible, given the diverse contexts of the teacher's work. The ease of use, portability and availability of smartphones with data for Internet access with over seventy per cent of the teachers (Chandran & Roy, 2017) has enabled continuous activity on the Telegram groups. Teachers sent photographs of school and classroom activities, the work done on the computer, and notebooks. Faculty created prompts through readily available digital tools and simple methods broadcasted as images on the CoP, making the process simple to implement. We have been able to model new ways of interacting in online settings by making simple audio and video files using mobile phones and posting images from students’ notebooks and teachers’ work to initiate discussions. These new ways of interacting online have encouraged teachers to adopt these methods to share their classroom practices and make their school contexts visible in the CoPs.

Two challenges emerged in the design process. The first was using two different platforms, one for running the course on TISSx, and the other as a CoP on Telegram to function as a discussion forum for topics that are part of the course curriculum. An attempt to connect the two platforms (inserting prompts in the TISSx course as a cue for teachers to move to the Telegram CoP for discussions) was ineffective due to the teachers’ lack of self-paced engagement with the courses. Using two platforms (TISSx and Telegram App) to run an online course did not work. However, for teachers, the practice-based CPD design worked on the Telegram CoP.

Additionally, enabling the discussion forum on TISSx has facilitated a social learning design for the course. We have seen that subsequent runs of the courses for resource persons have yielded rich course-based discussions on TISSx (the evidence itself is beyond the scope of this research). Simultaneously the Telegram CoP has enabled a strong connection between university faculty (teacher educators), subject experts and school teachers to implement the practice component of the CPD and provide continuous academic and pedagogic support for teachers. Having two distinct CoPs for teachers CPD in the Indian context would be beneficial, where teachers engage in the course-based CoP for the duration of the course for a social learning experience and continue to engage on the Telegram CoP for continuing pedagogic support from peers, experts and teacher educators.

The second challenge was regarding discussions initiated on the Telegram CoP, which were difficult to track as the group chats are linear, and the discussions are not available as a single thread. As teachers are yet to develop reflection skills, such as describing their teaching and students’ work in text form, linking their teaching to students’ learning and theoretical ideas and so on, using multimedia was an essential first step to enable developing reflective skills. Hence an important goal is to design and develop a discussion thread feature within the Telegram App so that conversations related to a specific topic are organised and easy to follow. It would need to appear like a sub-conversation within the Telegram group. Members of the group should also view all threads posted in the group separately, just like they can access media and documents (see Figure 6).

Conclusion

The DBR approach to designing the mobile-based CoP enabled an iterative design process, considering the teacher's lived experiences to understand how theoretical ideas can be meaningfully translated into practical solutions and the interaction between theory and practice. The main theoretical idea behind an online CoP is the concept of asynchronous discussion forums. Since teacher educators and teachers are separated by space and time in an asynchronous discussion forum, the discussions related to distinct topics (or threads) into a meaningful unit for participants to access become critical for learning and knowledge generation. The initial design that included the organisation principle of discussion threads in the Telegram CoP was entirely rejected by the teachers, who found the design cumbersome and impractical. We were confused and struggled to give up the thread design principle during cycle one but were forced to do so based on the field response. The connection between the theoretical idea of discussion threads and the practical implemented design, which did not include the thread feature, was not immediately apparent. However, over time, it was clear that the teachers voiced concerns about the missing element of discussion threads in the Telegram CoP and found it difficult to follow threads of discussion on it. The theoretical idea was not abandoned, but demand for threads emerged through the participants’ voices upon analysing the data. We have earlier suggested that a discussion thread feature needs to be built into the Telegram CoP as a solid pedagogical affordance to function as a teacher's CoP, enabling organised, effective and easy access to the repository of threads anytime for CoP members. Such a feature would enhance a Telegram CoP to function as an epistemic community and build a discourse around teachers’ practical knowledge where teachers and educators actively support their and their peers’ professional growth. This complex and tenuous relationship between theory-based designs and how they emerge in real-world contexts became evident through the DBR approach.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Statements on Open Data,Ethics

The files containing anonymised data on which the analysis was performed is available from the corresponding author. This research was conducted under approval from the – Institutional Review Board-Research of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Teachers gave informed consent before data collection.

ORCID iD

Bindu R Thirumalai

Notes

Author Biographies

Bindu R Thirumalai is a faculty at CETE, TISS, Mumbai. Her PhD from TISS is an action research study on Teachers’ Communities of Practice. Over 400 mathematics teachers teaching in government high schools in Telangana State participated in the online community of practice that she managed for over two years. Her areas of expertise and research include teacher professional development, mathematics pedagogy and education technology.

Prof Padma Sarangapani is the Chairperson of the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her areas of expertise and research interests include Quality and Education, teaching and teacher education, curriculum studies, indigenous knowledge and knowledge transmission in non-school settings. Prof Sarangapani has been part of the steering committee of the National Curriculum Framework, 2005, New Delhi and a Nominated Member of the National Council for Teacher Education, NCTE, 2013 onwards.

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