by Kaat Somers, University Centre Sint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA), Belgium.
In todays digitalized society, people are in need of digital knowledge and competences to participate to everyday life. Higher education is no different in this: increasingly, we expect from our teachers and students to make use of digital devices in their teaching and learning. And although Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are finding their way into our education, teachers and students are often lacking the required digital literacy to effectively and fluently navigate within the world of digital education.
To manage an effective shift towards more digital education, knowing how to properly design learning experiences with digital enhancements, and how to become an expert in the pedagogical challenges inherent in digital or hybrid education has become a priority for higher education teachers. The e-learning module Digital Empowerment: training program for teachers, developed by the Erasmus+ project SLIDE, aims to answer this need. The e-course provides teachers with the knowledge and skills for successful and innovative use of emerging technologies in teaching, but also addresses barriers and negative effects of technologies on inclusion and diversity and how to overcome these challenges.
The SLIDE project: Answering a need for digital empowerment in higher education
The Erasmus+ project ‘Service-learning as a pedagogy to promote inclusion, diversity and digital empowerment’ or SLIDE was developed in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. This period taught us that both teachers and students in higher education still have a lot to learn in the transition towards more digital education. This was particularly apparent for teachers focusing on experiential teaching and learning methods, like service-learning. Experiential learning traditionally occurs on site, in a physical context. Higher education teachers involved in the service-learning pedagogy voiced a need for training in the use of emerging technologies in their teaching, to help them acquiring the skills and knowledge needed for an effective transition towards more digital education. In answer to the need of these teachers, the SLIDE project developed the e-course ‘Digital Empowerment’.
An e-course to enrich your teaching with emerging technologies
The e-course ‘Digital Empowerment’ is built on the principles of Learning Experience Design (LXD). Learning Experience Design is the process of designing engaging learning experiences, tailored to the target audience’s needs and preferences. There are three key elements to experiential learning: active participation, reflection, and assessment. The e-course assists higher education teachers to effectively respond to these 3 components in a digital way. It brings together information and knowledge on digital resources from different places and sources into one platform, and focusses this information on what knowledge and competences higher education teachers need for enriching their teaching with digital technologies.
The course aims to increase the capacity of higher education teachers to manage an effective shift towards digital education and to use emerging technologies to their full potential while employing instructional design strategies. With this e-course, the SLIDE project team wants to guides higher education teachers in the possibilities to integrate emerging technologies into their own learning experience design, with attention to digital gaps between student groups and in society as a whole.
The course is self-paced and registration for access is free. The course is clustered in eight modules, that can be followed independently. Each of the modules contains practical examples that come from universities from different countries in Europe to make the information concrete and applicable for multiple teaching practices. Teachers can select the modules they want to follow based on their needs and the applicability to their own teaching practices.
Interested in boosting your own digital empowerment and to enhance your skills and knowledge to include digital tools in a more effective and purposefully way into your education? Register and gain free and unlimited access to the SLIDE Training Hub via this link.
by Kaat Somers, University Centre Sint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA), Belgium.
