Co-Creating Practice-Based Scholarship to Advance Community-Centered Learning Experience Design in an Online Graduate Accessibility Course: A Practitioner-Scholar Co-Created Case Study

Practice-based scholarship offers a promising pathway for advancing both theory and practice in instructional and learning experience design (LXD), particularly when research is grounded in authentic, community-centered contexts. This co-created case study investigates how graduate students (i.e., master’s degree) engaged in a co-constructed design-based research (DBR) local impact evaluation phase project navigate multiple platforms (e.g., MS Teams, Zoom, Mural, shared documents), negotiate roles, seek assistance, and share emerging insights across the network, as they gain new knowledge, skills, and abilities. The aim is to demonstrate how researchers can support practitioner engagement in co-created research through the local impact evaluation phase of a DBR project to guide future improvements to an existing web accessibility course and contribute to valued scholarship. Through the lens of connectivism learning theory, this co-created study examines processes, artifacts, and support system components that enable graduate students to move beyond traditional coursework and contribute meaningfully as practice-based scholars. Data sources included collaborative digital artifacts, meeting transcripts, reflective questionnaires, informal peer interactions, and a co-created evaluation report. Analysis revealed that practitioner engagement spanned a continuum from collaboration to co-creation, with students assuming increasingly active roles in shaping the evaluation’s purpose, process, and outcomes. Findings highlight how participatory structures, reflexive practices, networked information sources, and digital collaboration tools support distributed ownership of the research and foster inclusive knowledge generation. This co-created study contributes an emerging model for integrating practice-based research into graduate education while extending the application of connectivism learning theory to participatory and co-constructed DBR projects and scholarship. Limitations include the single case design and potential instructor–researcher positionality bias. Future research should examine how practice-based scholarship can be scaled across programs and institutions, as well as its long-term impact on professional identity and research capacity. Overall, the study demonstrates that practice-based scholarship is not only pedagogically valuable but also potentially theoretically generative, advancing community-based and contextually grounded approaches to LXD.