Facilitating Discoverability of Educational Resources in Schools in Scotland

In my PhD project, I investigated the needs and challenges of primary and secondary school teachers in Scotland involved in finding, using, and sharing educational resources online. I did the research based in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Fiona McNeill and Professor Judy Robertson. My PhD was awarded in March 2026.

The project built on the earlier work Supporting the Discoverability of Open Educational Resources: On the Scent of a Hidden Treasury (2019).

Teachers’ information-seeking strategies are strongly shaped by the flexibility – or rigidity – of the education system they work in. Rigid systems prescribe resources; flexible systems leave teachers free to choose or make their own. That freedom helps teachers adapt to pupils’ learning needs, but it also makes lesson preparation harder and more time-consuming. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence has both flexible and rigid components, which made it a useful setting for studying this tension.

The work ran in three stages:

• Understanding the process. Interviews with 15 teachers and discussions with 30 experts informed a school-education-specific Teacher Educational Resource Search process model, describing the tasks and strategies teachers use to find, use, and share educational resources, situated in their work context.
• Reviewing existing tools. A review of the tools available to teachers clarified what they have in common and where they fall short of teachers’ actual needs.
• Designing and evaluating. Three rounds of iterative user-centred design with 12 teachers, 14 education experts, and 2 user experience designers. Prototypes were refined or discarded based on feedback, culminating in a browser plug-in that enhances Google search results with crowdsourced and AI generated educational metadata.

The plug-in then served as a research tool for a validation and evaluation study with 20 teachers working through simulated work tasks. The study supported the validity of the Teacher Educational Resource Search process model – including new scenarios where teachers used generative AI tools instead of traditional search – and expanded on the strategies teachers commonly use. Teacher feedback on the tools, including the prototype plug-in, led to a refined set of software design guidelines for supporting educational resource search.

Overall, the thesis contributes a validated process model of school teachers’ educational resource search, use, and sharing practices in education system context. The findings are grounded in the experiences of over 40 teachers and 40 experts.