digital literacies

Within the study of digital literacies per se, one potential pitfall is focusing too closely on narrow dimensions, such as gaining new digital skills, at the expense of ensuring that learners develop the lifelong capac-ity needed to distinguish digital literacy from simple digital proficiency.

Digital literacies include data literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, and metaliter-acy, as well as related capacities for assessing social and ethical issues in our digital world.

NGDLE

NGDLE

competency-based education and new methods of assessment (from #5 to #16)

See how the results of the latest ELI Key Issues in Teaching and Learning Survey stack up against responses from years past.

Key Issues in Teaching and Learning

Some students have been conditioned by experience in other online courses to expect to be able to read and study quietly by themselves for a few weeks, post a minimum number of discussion board posts in a single day, and complete an exam or writing assignment at the end of a unit or module. The chunky model, with its frequent required interaction, may disappoint students who want to be able to proceed more independently. For that reason, we encourage students to refl ect and comment on the process as we go along. We make design visible by asking students to engage and respond to the course content and design in real time. Inevitably, some students will express resistance, arguing that they enrolled in an online course specifi cally to be able to “work on my own schedule.” So it is important to take those concerns seriously and encourage students to express them. In a writing course, we argue that students can measurably benefi t from breaking major writing projects into a series of steps that can be completed in short units of time.

In practice, applying the concept of chunked content in course design can work in many ways. For several years, we have been using backward design and creating course schedules in which writing activities were usually due on the same day each week. We discovered, perhaps predictably, that most students were logging on to post writing the day assignments were due. This created a rhythm where activity in the course community spiked one day each week, followed by a period of quiet in between. In our recent courses, we have moved to design schedules where short, work-in-progress tasks are due two or three times per week. While the total net amount of writing students do has not changed, breaking the writing into two or three mini-activities has helped to create a more constant fl ow of activity and discourse in and around the course environment.

Start with the problem.

“we do see patterns in the literature about what types of technologies and approaches are most likely to have positive effects,” she said. In general, they are tools that: increase the flexibility of what happens in the classroom, rather than overly scripting it; give students lots of opportunity to explore; and engage students in active problem solving.

“If you just use a new digital learning technology without changing anything else, chances are you’re not going to have a significant impact” on learning

But their other key takeaway was that the use of technology itself appears not to be primarily responsible for the improved outcomes. Rather, the accumulated studies they shared found that the biggest effects came when the instructors changed what material they taught and how they taught it.