The Spectrum of Digital Teaching at the UofL
Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age requires of us educators to examine our practice more closely to ensure that the learning we design works to empower our students and build the trusting relationships that help guide them in achieving competence and independence. No tool is neutral and so we need to view the nature and effects of the digital technologies through a set of very critical eyes to recognize the values coded into them.
In their book “An Urgency of Teachers” Morris and Stommel (2018) make the case for “a shift we must make toward valuing more the work — affective, flawed, nuanced, unfolding—that teachers (all of them) do online and in classrooms, and also the important work wrought upon the heart and mind by an education that is concerned with the human.”
This chapter was written with the intention to value the digital work educators do on our UofL campus. As you will see with each of the following individual interviews, this digital work is centred around our students, not the tools that are being employed to facilitate student learning. The approaches presented will show you how broad the spectrum of digital teaching is at our university, where increasingly more professors and instructors incorporate blended learning into their teaching or even facilitate full courses online.
What is common to all of the educators presented in this part of the book is not only their intention to foster learning and agency in our students, but to also centre their practice on community and collaboration with like-minded peers. Thus, this chapter comes with an open invitation to reach out to each of the individuals with any of your teaching-related questions you might have after reading the interviews.
The scope of topics being discussed covers a broad range of digital teaching practices; from blended learning to classroom technologies, online teaching and Open Education.
Interviews in this part will allow you insights into the Hows and Whys regarding:
- Online course design and facilitation
- Using Moodle for online teaching
- Facilitating Team-Based Learning
- Using personal websites for online instruction
- Open Textbook authoring to pair content with courses and alleviate cost burden to students
- Creating a digital Blackfoot dictionary
- Adopting open textbooks to teach introductory courses
- Curating digital primary resources for instruction
- Creating an openly accessible website for shared use of resources
References:
Morris, S. M. & Stommel, J. (2018). Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition. IN: An Urgency of Teachers. CC-BY-4.0. Retrieved from https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/
