The New Media Consortium (NMC) has released Digital Literacy in Higher Education, Part II: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief, a follow-up to its 2016 strategic brief on digital literacy.
But what does it really mean to be digitally literate, and which standards do we use?” said Dr. Eden Dahlstrom, NMC Executive Director. “This report sheds light on the meaning and impact of digital literacy using cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary approaches, highlighting frameworks and exemplars in practice.
NMC’s report has identified a need for institutions and thought leaders to consider the ways in which content creation is unequally expressed throughout the world. In an examination of digital literacy within European, Middle Eastern, and African nations (EMEA), research has surfaced unequal access to information technology based on inequalities of economics, gender, race, and political divides.
2020
2015
1.
Complex Problem Solving
1.
Complex Problem Solving
2.
Critical Thinking
2.
Coordinating with Others
3.
Creativity
3.
People Management
4.
People Management
4.
Critical Thinking
5.
Coordinating with Others
5.
Negotiation
6.
Emotional Intelligence
6.
Quality Control
7.
Judgment and Decision Making
7.
Service Orientation
8.
Service Orientation
8.
Judgment and Decision Making
9.
Negotiation
9.
Active Listening
10.
Cognitive Flexibility
10.
Creativity
Digital tools themselves are merely enablers, pushing the envelope of what learners can create. No longer is it acceptable for students to be passive consumers of content; they can contribute to the local and global knowledge ecosystem, learning through the act of producing and discussing rich media, applications, and objects. In the words of many institutional mission statements, students do not have to wait until they graduate to change the world.
Using readily available digital content creation tools (e.g., video production and editing, web and graphic tools), students are evolving into digital storytellers,
digital literacy now encompasses the important skills of being able to coordinate with others to create something truly original that neither mind would fathom independently.
The ability to discern credible from inaccurate resources is foundational to digital literacy. my note: #Fakenews
A lack of broad consensus on the meaning of digital literacy still hinders its uptake, although a growing body of research is helping higher education professionals better navigate the continuous adjustments to the field brought about by emerging pedagogies and technologies.
Information literacy is a nearly universal component within these digital literacy frameworks. Critically finding, assessing, and using digital content within the vast and sometimes chaotic internet appears as a vital skill in almost every account, including those published beyond libraries. In contrast, media literacy is less widely included in digital literacy publications, possibly due to a focus on scholarly, rather than popular, materials. Digital literacies ultimately combine information and media literacy.
United States digital literacy frameworks tend to focus on educational policy details and personal empowerment, the latter encouraging learners to become more effective students, better creators, smarter information consumers, and more influential members of their community.
National policies are vitally important in European digital literacy work, unsurprising for a continent well populated with nation-states and struggling to redefine itself… this recommendation for Balkan digital strategy: “Media and information education (with an emphasis on critical thinking and switching from consumption to action) should start at early ages, but address all ages.”
African digital literacy is more business-oriented. Frameworks often speak to job skills and digital entrepreneurship. New skills and professions are emphasized, symbolized by the call for “new collar” positions.
Middle Eastern nations offer yet another variation, with a strong focus on media literacy. As with other regions, this can be a response to countries with strong state influence or control over local media. It can also represent a drive to produce more locally-sourced content, as opposed to consuming
Digital literacy is a complex phenomenon in 2017, when considered internationally. Nations and regions are creating ways to help their populations grapple with the digital revolution that are shaped by their local situations. In doing so, they cut across the genealogy of digital literacies, touching on its historical components: information literacy, digital skills, and media literacy.
Students are not all digital natives, and do not necessarily have the same level of capabilities. Some need to be taught to use online tools (such as how to navigate a LMS) for learning. However, once digital literacy skills for staff and students are explicitly recognized as important for learning and teaching, critical drivers for pedagogical change are in place.
Pedagogy that uses an inquiry based/problem solving approach is a great framework to enhance the use and practice of digital skills/capabilities in the classroom.
The current gap between students’ information literacy skills and their need to internalize digital literacy competencies creates an opportunity for academic librarians to support students in the pursuit of civic online reasoning at the core of NMC’s multimodal model of three digital literacies. Academic librarians need a new strategy that evolves information literacy to an expanded role educating digitally literate students. Let’s build a new model in which academic librarians are entrepreneurial collaborators with faculty,55 supporting their classroom efforts to help students become responsible sharers and commentators of news on social media.
“Digital literacy is not just about ensuring that students can use the latest technologies, but also developing skills to select the right tools for a particular context to deepen their learning outcomes and engage in creative problem-solving”
There is a disconnect between how students experience and interact with technology in their personal lives and how they use technology in their roles as students. Yes, students are digitally savvy, and yes, universities have a role in questioning (insightfully of course) their sometimes brash digital savviness. We have a situation where students are expecting more, but (as I see it) cannot provide a clear demand, while faculty are unable to walk in the shoes of the students.
Mnkandla, Ernest, and Ansie Minnaar. 2017. “The Use of Social Media in E-Learning: A Metasynthesis.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 18 (5). http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3014.
This research represents a conceptual framework designed to explain the adoption of social media into e-learning by using online collaborative learning (OCL) in higher education. Social media in e-learning signals the end of distance education in higher education.
The proposed framework could be useful to instructional designers and academics who are interested in using modern learning theories and want to adopt social media in e-learning in higher education as a deep learning strategy.
The major paradigms underlying the theoretical frameworks that were investigated were included in social learning theory, social interactivity theory, constructionism and social constructivism, and online collaborative learning theory (Harasim, 2012). Collaboration and social constructivism were the main theoretical frameworks guiding the use of social media in e-learning in higher education that point towards a more integrative (collaborative) and co-constructivism peer supportive approach to learning in the digital age.
My note: sometimes around 2011, the Chronicle had a report on Berkeley students listening to coursecasts at 2X (can’t find the reference). Here some other sources about #speedlistening:
the introduction of Overcast, a podcast-playback app designed by the creator of the text-bookmaking app Instapaper. One of Overcast’s key selling points is a feature called Smart Speed. Smart Speed isn’t about simply playing audio content at 150 or 200 percent of the standard rate; it instead tries to remove, algorithmically, the extraneous things that can bulk up the play time of audio content: dead air, pauses between sentences, intros and outros, that kind of thing.
Dr. Vijayender NallaRafiat A. I am visiting back to your post to share the insights from engaging students in an e-learning mode. You can review the post here:
While there has been significant attention to improving the key technology (that is the Learning Management Systems) the critical instructional design part (which forms the essence of creating the engagement) is in it’s early stages. Instructional design, the way we at Agribusiness Academy understand is made up of 2-elements: 1) quality of content (the storytelling style is what seems to work which should form the core focus area for the content expert to master); and 2) the manner in which this content is delivered (to the learner) to fulfill the learning objectives .
The emergence of the chief online officer position at many institutions is strong evidence that online education is becoming more mainstream
Revenue generation and tuition
most responding institutions have online program tuition rates that are aligned with standard tuition or that are higher. Those higher tuition rates ranged from 12 percent of private institutions to 29 percent of four-year public institutions, and lower than standard tuition rates ranged from 3 percent of community colleges to 37 percent of private institutions. None of the larger online programs reported tuition rates for online students that are lower than standard tuition rates, and 20 percent reported higher tuition rates for online study.
Course development
Forty percent of chief online officers in larger programs larger programs use instructional design support, and 30 percent use a team approach to online course design. Ten percent outsource course design.
This kind of course development is in stark contrast to practices of chief online officers in mid-sized and smaller programs. Among the smallest online education programs, 18 percent of chief online officers expect faculty to develop online courses independently, and 53 percent treat instructional design support as a faculty option. This means that a combined 71 percent of smaller programs do not mandate the use of instructional design specialists.
In 13 percent of mid-sized programs, faculty are expected to develop courses independently, and in 64 percent of mid-sized programs, they are free to choose whether or not to involve instructional design specialists, yielding a combined 77 percent of programs that do not require the use of instructional design expertise.
Teaching, learning and technology
The CHLOE survey also asked chief online officers to name three technologies or tools they consider most important or innovative for their institution’s fully-online programs. Eighty-one percent first listed an LMS, while others named audio and video conferencing and lecture capture. The technologies most-cited for second- and third-most important were conferencing, video and lecture capture software. (see Plamen’s effort to start faculty discussion on lecture capture here: http://blog.stcloudstate.edu/coursecapture/)
“There was no sign of much-hyped innovations like adaptive learning, competency-based education LMS solutions, or simulation or game-based learning tools,” according to the study. “Such tools may be in use for specific courses or programs but based on responses to CHLOE, these have yet to achieve institution-wide adoption at any scale.” (see Plamen’s efforts start a discussion on game-based learning here: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=game-based+learning
Blended learning is in one dimension broadly defined as “The convergence of online and face-to-face Education” as in the study by Watson (2008). At the same time it is important to also include the dimension of technology and media use as it has been depicted in the multimodal conceptual model in Figure 1 below. This conceptual model was proposed and presented in an article published by Picciano (2009). Critical Factors for Implementing Blended Learning in Higher Education.
online face to face hybrid
Several studies that argue for the need to focus on pedagogy and learning objectives and not solely on technology (Hoffinan, 2006; Garrison & Vaughan, 2008; Al amm ary et al., 2014; McGee & Reis, 2012; Shand, Glassett Farrelly & Costa, 2016). Other findings in this study are that technology still is a critical issue (So & Brush, 2008; Fleming, Becker & Newton, 2017), not least in developing regions (AI Busaidi & Al-Shihi, 2012; Raphae1 & Mtebe, 2016), and also the more positive idea of technology as a supporting factor for innovative didactics and instructional design to satisfy the needs in heterogeneous student groups (Picciano, 2009). Critical Factors for Implementing Blended Learning in Higher Education.
Critical factors:
technology
didactics – pedagogy, instructional design and the teacher role
Course outcomes – learning outcomes and learner satisfaction
collaboration and social presence
course design
the heritage from technology enhanced distance courses
a learning management system (LMS) is never the solution to every problem in education. Edtech is just one part of the whole learning ecosystem and student experience.
Therefore, the next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE), as envisioned by EDUCAUSE in 2015 … Looking at the NGDLE requirements from an LMS perspective, I view the NGDLE as being about five areas: interoperability; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; accessibility and universal design.
Interoperability
Content can easily be exchanged between systems.
Users are able to leverage the tools they love, including discipline-specific apps.
Learning data is available to trusted systems and people who need it.
The learning environment is “future proof” so that it can adapt and extend as the ecosystem evolves.
Personalization
The learning environment reflects individual preferences.
Departments, divisions, and institutions can be autonomous.
Instructors teach the way they want and are not constrained by the software design.
There are clear, individual learning paths.
Students have choice in activity, expression, and engagement.
Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
Learning analytics helps to identify at-risk students, course progress, and adaptive learning pathways.
The learning environment enables integrated planning and assessment of student performance.
More data is made available, with greater context around the data.
The learning environment supports platform and data standards.
Collaboration
Individual spaces persist after courses and after graduation.
Learners are encouraged as creators and consumers.
Courses include public and private spaces.
Accessibility and Universal Design
Accessibility is part of the design of the learning experience.
The learning environment enables adaptive learning and supports different types of materials.
Learning design includes measurement rubrics and quality control.
The core analogy used in the NGDLE paper is that each component of the learning environment is a Lego brick:
The days of the LMS as a “walled garden” app that does everything is over.
Today many kinds of amazing learning and collaboration tools (Lego bricks) should be accessible to educators.
We have standards that let these tools (including an LMS) talk to each other. That is, all bricks share some properties that let them fit together.
Students and teachers sign in once to this “ecosystem of bricks.”
The bricks share results and data.
These bricks fit together; they can be interchanged and swapped at will, with confidence that the learning experience will continue uninterrupted.
Any “next-gen” attempt to completely rework the pedagogical model and introduce a “mash-up of whatever” to fulfil this model would fall victim to the same criticisms levied at the LMS today: there is too little time and training to expect faculty to figure out the nuances of implementation on their own.
The Lego metaphor works only if we’re talking about “old school” Lego design — bricks of two, three, and four-post pieces that neatly fit together. Modern edtech is a lot more like the modern Lego. There are wheels and rocket launchers and belts and all kinds of amazing pieces that work well with each other, but only when they are configured properly. A user cannot simply stick together different pieces and assume they will work harmoniously in creating an environment through which each student can be successful.
As the NGDLE paper states: “Despite the high percentages of LMS adoption, relatively few instructors use its more advanced features — just 41% of faculty surveyed report using the LMS ‘to promote interaction outside the classroom.'”
But this is what the next generation LMS is good at: being a central nervous system — or learning hub — through which a variety of learning activities and tools are used. This is also where the LMS needs to go: bringing together and making sense of all the amazing innovations happening around it. This is much harder to do, perhaps even impossible, if all the pieces involved are just bricks without anything to orchestrate them or to weave them together into a meaningful, personal experience for achieving well-defined learning outcomes.
Making a commitment to build easy, flexible, and smart technology
Working with colleges and universities to remove barriers to adopting new tools in the ecosystem
Standardizing the vetting of accessibility compliance (the Strategic Nonvisual Access Partner Program from the National Federation of the Blind is a great start)
Advancing standards for data exchange while protecting individual privacy
Building integrated components that work with the institutions using them — learning quickly about what is and is not working well and applying those lessons to the next generation of interoperability standards
Letting people use the tools they love [SIC] and providing more ways for nontechnical individuals (including students) to easily integrate new features into learning activities
My note: something just refused to be accepted at SCSU
Technologists are often very focused on the technology, but the reality is that the more deeply and closely we understand the pedagogy and the people in the institutions — students, faculty, instructional support staff, administrators — the better suited we are to actually making the tech work for them.
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Under the Hood of a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment in Progress
The challenge is that although 85 percent of faculty use a campus learning management system (LMS),1 a recent Blackboard report found that, out of 70,000 courses across 927 North American institutions, 53 percent of LMS usage was classified as supplemental(content-heavy, low interaction) and 24 percent as complementary (one-way communication via content/announcements/gradebook).2 Only 11 percent were characterized as social, 10 percent as evaluative (heavy use of assessment), and 2 percent as holistic (balanced use of all previous). Our FYE course required innovating beyond the supplemental course-level LMS to create a more holistic cohort-wide NGDLE in order to fully support the teaching, learning, and student success missions of the program.The key design goals for our NGDLE were to:
Create a common platform that could deliver a standard curriculum and achieve parity in all course sections using existing systems and tools and readily available content
Capture, store, and analyze any generated learner data to support learning assessment, continuous program improvement, and research
Develop reports and actionable analytics for administrators, advisors, instructors, and students
Request from Plovdiv University faculty and teachers from the Plovdiv school district for literature on the issue of online reading for K4 students
Putman, S. M. (2014). Exploring Dispositions Toward Online Reading: Analyzing the Survey of Online Reading Attitudes and Behaviors. Reading Psychology, 35(1), 1-31. doi:10.1080/02702711.2012.664250
Research continues to emerge that pro-vides us with information about the cognitive skills and strategies relevant to the proficient use of the new literacies of the Internet, but conclusions regarding dispositions and affective variables are notably limited. For this reason, it is important that researchers begin to focus concurrently on both areas to inform the educational community regarding how to meet the rapidly changing needs of our current and future students.
Coiro, J. (2011). Talking About Reading as Thinking: Modeling the Hidden Complexities of Online Reading Comprehension. Theory Into Practice, 50(2), 107-115. doi:10.1080/00405841.2011.558435
Hutchison, A. C., Woodward, L., & Colwell, J. (2016). What Are Preadolescent Readers Doing Online? An Examination of Upper Elementary Students’ Reading, Writing, and Communication in Digital Spaces. Reading Research Quarterly, 51(4), 435-454. doi:10.1002/rrq.146
he performance of 1,262 fourth and fifth graders on the Survey of Internet Use and Online Reading.
(c) despite reporting a preference for using the Internet, preadolescent students believe that it is more difficult to use it than to read a book, and believe that they would learn
more from a book than from the Internet;
Huang, S., Orellana, P., & Capps, M. (2016). U.S. and Chilean College Students’ Reading Practices: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Reading Research Quarterly, 51(4), 455-471. doi:10.1002/rrq.144
My note: this may seem peripheral study to the request in terms of age, but the cross-cultural study can help the Bulgarian research
Due to the impact of the Internet on reading resources, students’ reading patterns today are different from how they were in the past. College students’ reading practices have moved to different venues with the advent of Internet technology, and the modality has migrated to online reading.
Naumann, J. (2015). A model of online reading engagement: Linking engagement, navigation, and performance in digital reading. Computers In Human Behavior, 53263-277. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.051
model of online reading engagement is outlined. This model proposes that online reading engagement predicts dedication in digital reading. Dedication in digital reading according to the model is reflected in task-adaptive navigation, and task-adaptive navigation predicts digital reading performance over and above print reading skill. Information engagement is assumed to positively predict task-adaptive navigation, while social engagement is assumed to negatively predict task-adaptive navigation. These hypotheses were tested using OECD PISA 2009 Digital Reading Assessment data from 17 countries and economies ( N = 29,395).
Alvermann, D. E., & Harrison, C. (2016). Are Computers, Smartphones, and the Internet a Boon or a Barrier for the Weaker Reader?. Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(2), 221-225. doi:10.1002/jaal.569
If boys are spending nine hours a day media multitasking and prefer computers to books, shouldn’t they be successful at online learning? Online learning requires online reading, which means that boys, who are significantly poorer readers than girls in every nation in the world, may well be struggling to keep up. an online student may not have access to the learning that can come from group interaction, nor to the social and emotional support that can come from peers or a teacher, and the online reader could be heading for a learning apocalypse
Park, H., & Kim, D. (2017). English language learners’ strategies for reading online texts: Influential factors and patterns of use at home and in school. International Journal Of Educational Research, 8263-74. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2017.01.002
five fourth and fifth-grade English language learners’ (ELLs) strategy use when they read online texts at home and in school. We also identify factors that play a role when these learners read online texts, as well as similar and different patterns in reading strategies at home and in school. The findings show that three factors influence the ELLs’ selection of online texts and use of reading strategies. In addition, the ELLs used nine reading strategies to enhance their reading online texts. Based on these findings, we discuss (a) the ELLs’ online reading strategies in different contexts, (b) the multidimensional zone of proximal development, and (c) collaboration between parents and teachers.
Leu, D. J., Forzani, E., Timbrell, N., & Maykel, C. (2015). Seeing the Forest, Not the Trees. Reading Teacher, 69(2), 139-145. doi:10.1002/trtr.1406
a primary goal is to develop the ability to read in order to learn with online information. Technologies that support this goal, especially the Internet, and instructional practices that support the development of online reading should be our primary consideration for reading and literacy education, beginning in the primary grades.
Brynge, E., Case, H., Forsyth, E., Green, G., & Hölke, U. (2015). Libraries: Sustaining the Digital Reader Experience. Scholarly & Research Communication, 1-10.
95 percent of larger programs (those with 2,500 or more online program students) are “wholly asynchronous” while 1.5 percent are mainly or completely synchronous. About three-quarters (73 percent) of mid-sized programs (schools with between 500 and 2,499 online program students) and 62 percent of smaller programs are fully asynchronous.
The asynchronous nature of this kind of education may explain why threaded discussions turned up as the most commonly named teaching and learning technique, mentioned by 27.4 percent of respondents, closely followed by practice-based learning, listed by 27.3 percent of survey participants.
While the LMS plays a significant role in online programming, the report pointed to a distinct lack of references to “much-hyped innovations,” such as adaptive learning, competency-based education systems, simulation or game-based learning tools. (my note: my mouth run dry of repeating every time people start becoming orgasmic about LMS, D2L in particular)
four in 10 require the use of instructional design support, three in 10 use a team approach for online course design and one in 10 outsources the work. Overall, some 80 percent of larger programs use instructional design expertise.
In the smallest programs, instructional design support is treated as a “faculty option” for 53 percent of institutions. Another 18 percent expect faculty to develop their online courses independently. For 13 percent of mid-sized programs, the faculty do their development work independently; another 64 percent may choose whether or not to bring in instructional design help. (my note: this is the SCSU ‘case’)
Measuring Quality
Among the many possible quality metrics suggested by the researchers, the five adopted most frequently for internal monitoring were:
Student achievement of program objectives (83 percent);
Student retention and graduation rates (77 percent);
Dr. Vijayender Nalla Rafiat A. I am visiting back to your post to share the insights from engaging students in an e-learning mode. You can review the post here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/live-learning-ice-breaker-engaging-e-learners-dr-vijayender-nalla
While there has been significant attention to improving the key technology (that is the Learning Management Systems) the critical instructional design part (which forms the essence of creating the engagement) is in it’s early stages. Instructional design, the way we at Agribusiness Academy understand is made up of 2-elements: 1) quality of content (the storytelling style is what seems to work which should form the core focus area for the content expert to master); and 2) the manner in which this content is delivered (to the learner) to fulfill the learning objectives .
Live Learning initiative