There are currently approximately 20.2 million children in Nigeria out of school, exacerbated by ongoing conflicts demonstrating an ongoing need for Emergency Remote Education (ERE). Despite this, Nigeria remains an under-explored context and the specific challenges of providing ERE there are not fully understood. This paper reports on a mixed methods study of teachers experiences of enacting ERE in Nigeria in April 2020 with a questionnaire (n=374), diary study and follow up interviews (n=20) carried out. The contributions of the paper are two-fold; firstly, an in-depth study of ERE in Nigeria, demonstrating that teachers used WhatsApp as a tool of practical necessity, configured it to create a continued sense of place, and continued to enact largely traditional pedagogies. Secondly, through reflection on these findings, we offer initial design considerations for technology use in ERE in low resource settings before outlining continuing design challenges for HCI researchers in this context.

HCI researchers are increasingly interested in the evaluation of educational technologies in context, yet acknowledge that challenges remain regarding the logistical, material and methodological constraints of this approach to research [ 18 , 53 ]. Through the analysis of the authors’ contributed thematic research vignettes, the following article exposes the practical realities of evaluating educational technologies in school settings. This includes insights into the planning stages of evaluation, the relationship between the researcher and the school environment, and the impact of the school context on the data collection process. We conclude by providing an orientation for the design of HCI educational technology research undertaken in school contexts, providing guidance such as considering the role of modular research design, clarifying goals and expectations with school partners, and reporting researcher positionality.

Educational technologies offer benefits in the classroom but there are barriers to their successful integration, including teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their skills and experience. Participatory Design (PD) approaches offer one way in which teachers can be directly involved in the design of classroom technologies, however PD processes alone fail to address the challenges of integrating technology within existing practices. In this paper we propose co-teaching as a novel form of co-design practice. We describe a two year longitudinal Co-Teaching project resulting in the development and use of three digital designs for the classroom. Using the TPACK model to guide our reflections we offer insights into the ways that co-teaching can support the design and integration of educational technologies. We suggest that co-teaching as a form of co-design practice offers a way to move teachers from passive adopters of technology to active participants in the design and integration of educational technologies.

Supporting Practice-based vocational skills development in the classroom can be logistically challenging, however tangible interfaces present natural affordances for supporting such skill development. In the context of teaching stage lighting specifically, we present an open source toolkit based around tangible hardware proxies to support the teaching of practice-based skills. Our tangible proxies embody key configuration, interaction and optical properties of real stage equipment. Drawing on notions of representation and bi-directional digital-to-physical transformation, we design a toolkit that specifically supports a gradual transition between virtual, simulated and real equipment during the learning journey, and open the door to embedding stage craft into schools. Through reporting on deployments in two schools, we discuss the affordances of such proxies and their potential for supporting the teaching and learning of practice-based skills in the classroom.