MOOC on Digital Literacy

The Digital Literacy Lab for Educators (DLLE) offers an essential course of personal and professional development for instructors, mentors, learners, and anyone interested in new approaches to education. The course is centred on supporting individuals to become more responsible ‘netizens’ or engage in good ‘netizenship’. For student and educator alike, it is essential to have good digital literacy skills to participate meaningfully and responsibly in the online world. The uncertain future facing the education sector and indeed, society at large as triggered by the Covid-19 crisis, makes the need for widespread digital literacy even greater. DLLE sets itself apart from other resources in the digital literacy space by connecting the dots between critical thinking and literacy, and the digital world. This means that the focus is on cognitive skills rather than technical knowledge development. Participants will be pushed to rethink how their activity online and offline contributes to their personal and professional development.

Internet Connectivity Accommodations (offline, non-aural or asynchronous participation)

 The course designers recognize that participants will not always have reliable or accessible Internet connectivity. Varying accommodations will be provided to enable offline or asynchronous access to content including:

1. For all videos, there is a “Doc” icon to the right of a given video link: . Clicking on this link will download a text-based transcript. You will also see a volume icon to the right: . By clicking on this icon, you will have access to the audio content only of the video. Finally, in a given video, you may reduce or increase the resolution of the video from 240p (low resolution) to 1080p (high resolution). Simply click on the number to change the resolution - see this at the bottom left of a video screen, next to the horizontal time line bar: . These features will enable those with Internet connectivity issues to access content in formats that consume less bandwidth.
2. Synchronous sessions (webinars) will be available as video or audio files for viewing or listening asynchronously online (after the session ends)

Finally, all materials are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License, or CC BY-SA. See more information on Creative Commons here.

The Digital Literacy Lab is designed for educators and lifelong learners from diverse backgrounds. Anyone interested in developing their own levels of digital literacy or supporting the acquisition of this essential 21st Century skill in other learners would benefit from participating in this course.

There will be two levels of certification in the course:

The course will adhere to an Honour Code to determine one’s level of participation in the course relative to 1a) – c) and 2a) – c) – engaging with all content, and posting in the Forum. At the end of each week, participants will be asked to complete a short checklist to indicate what tasks they have completed (again, see 1. and 2. below). The course coordinators will do spot checks to verify participants' responses to these checklists. Those awarded certificates will be notified by email approximately two weeks after the course has ended. 

1. Certificate of Achievement:

a) Read, listen and view all content (e.g., PDFs, Docs, Audio and Video files)

b) Submit 5 (five) original postings in the Forum

c) Submit 5 (five) replies to other learners’ postings in the Forum

2. Certificate of Participation:

a) Read, listen and view all content (e.g., PDFs, Docs, Audio and Video files)

b) Submit 3 (three) original postings in the Forum

c) Submit 3 (three) replies to other learners’ postings in the Forum