Advancing ISD Education Research with Bioecological Systems Theory

The Information Systems (IS) community designs and delivers IS curricula in higher education and faces pedagogical challenges in teaching some complex and technical material. Many of us are involved in the design, implementation, evaluation, adoption, and use of IS to support education and training in academia and in industry. Yet IS research on education is often based on technologically deterministic assumptions about the impact of technology on education outcomes and involves narrowly focused studies on the use and impact of technology in education. In this paper, we introduce IS to Bioecological Theory (BET), whose insights have had a transformative effect in the field of developmental psychology but not well known in IS. We use BET to map existing literature on IS and Higher Education and also outline how this theory can be used in IS to inform the design of technological artifacts to support students’ learning processes.