Digital Teaching and Learning: The Pre-Edit

We know from the raw experience of keeping the business of education going during Covid that we need to move well beyond 'emergency remote teaching'. Emergency remote teaching saw us grab the nearest digital tool to deliver online lessons, learning and assessment without always stopping to ask whether we had the best tool for the pedagogical job. Now is the time to critical stock. 

This 5 week programme brings together a global community of educators to do just this in a safe and supportive online space. Using The Critical and Creative Cycle™, we will explore how we as teachers and learners can best bring digital tools into education. Our context is in part our shared experience of teaching and learning in the midst of a global health crisis. But we will be going further than this: together, we will evaluate the 'EdTech' ('education technology') sector at large within the context of key debates taking place within education. Through a series of curated readings, critical questions and workshops, we will look at the boom and bust of EdTech initiatives, we will unpick what makes an 'education hero', we will explore what the 'learning sciences' can tell us about how we best learn and why, and we will define what we really mean by 'C21st knowledge and skills'.

The aim? To equip us as teachers and learners with the critical framework to leverage digital tools to turn education hopes and ambitions into reality whilst ensuring that 'education' always comes before the 'tech'. 

This programme is the companion initiative to The Digital Literacy Lab for Educators (DLLE). 

Registration for the live and interactive sessions must be effected here, should you wish to participate.

Following every live session, all materials will be uploaded onto the course platform. All recordings will feature on the YouTube DTL playlist here. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

During the Covid-19 crisis, the world has sought salvation in digital tools to sustain the business of education. Meanwhile, the EdTech industry has mushroomed, with 2020 reporting record levels of investment in digital tools for teaching and learning. This growth is set to continue as blended/hybrid learning becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of education.

Yet, as Keith Turvey lamented in July 2020, educators receive little training in how to make sound pedagogical choices when selecting tools to deliver on learning outcomes. This hampers educators’ ability to sort the impactful digital wheat from the distracting – and potentially very costly, both in terms of time and money – digital chaff. In the longer term, this lack of support undermines educators’ digital literacy development.

In 2021 we need to move well beyond emergency remote teaching. We need to dig deep into the learning sciences, to bring the evidence of how we learn to bear on the trends currently driving education technology and the tools emerging from them. We need to take our cue from the intensified debates around the transformation of education to ensure that we equip learners with meaningful knowledge and skills to thrive in C21st society. To do so, we need to underpin our teaching and learning now and in the future with ongoing digital literacy development.

No prior knowledge is required and participation in DLLE is not a prerequisite to participating in the Digital Teaching and Learning: The Pre-Edit. 

Participants who join will have the opportunity to shape the course content for the follow-on MOOC programme: Digital Teaching and Learning: The Deep Edit.

Those who join the cohort will gain:

• An introduction to a fresh reimagining of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy and how this model can support our digital literacy development as teachers and learners.

• Critical awareness of the ‘EdTech’ boom and what this means for us as teachers and learners.

• An introduction into the learning sciences by way of practical insights from leaders in the field regarding how we best learn.

• Access to a global community of teachers and learners and the opportunity to share and compare experiences and reflections on some of the most burning topics of our current education reality.

• The opportunity to shape a follow-on initiative expanding on the material covered in the programme.

A Certificate of Participation will be awarded on completion of a reflective exercise.