Between potential and practice : teacher engagement with blended learning platforms through a service design lens

Abstract

This thesis investigates why teachers with access to a comprehensive blended learning platform engage with it differently – some extensively, some selectively, and some barely at all – and what service design interventions could help close the gap between what the platform offers and what teachers use in everyday school practice. Conducted in collaboration with a Latvian educational publishing company, the study applies a Double Diamond service design framework across four research phases: a semi-structured interview with the industry partner, an autoethnographic exploration of the platform, a co-creation workshop with seven secondary school teachers, and validation interviews with two international EdTech experts. The findings show that teacher disengagement is not primarily a motivational or training problem, but rather it is a design problem rooted in interface friction, content gaps, and a structural misalignment between how the platform is organized and how teachers actually work. A consolidated set of 35 service design interventions was developed, prioritised through an impact-effort matrix, and validated by the industry partner and external experts. The study provides one of the first empirical accounts of teacher platform engagement in a small-country, single-language educational market, and demonstrates the value of combining service design methods with technology acceptance frameworks in applied EdTech research.