Task 5
Reflections:

Description: Digital literacy for online learning course has been quite a journey for me. I have been involved in ICT for more than 25 years and I have been teaching ICT for more than 17 years at the tertiary level. However, I have never been exposed to the theoretical foundations and frameworks for Digital Literacy and never thought about the differences between Digital Skills and Literacies. So, I have learned quite a bit on these topics. I learned significantly more while doing the short research as part of the task 4 of the assessment. Here are the key items I have learned: 1. A collection of OERu courses, learning materials, tools and forums. 2. Personal Learning networks and how to actively build one, 3. Digital Literacy and how it differs from Digital Skills. 4. Difference Frameworks and assessment tools for Digital Literacy.

Evaluation: The OERu book titled “Web literacy for student Fact-Checkers" by Mike Caulfield gave me a new perspective on how to develop students’ digital literacy skills. The contents in this book really fascinated me and will remain as a big part of my learning journey. I understood how it is possible to develop digital literacy while the students work on improving their digital skills. It did change the way I have been teaching focusing on digital skills only. The bad part of this learning journey was when OERu bookmarks site was not letting me add more than ten items. It was fixed later on.

Analysis: The formal introduction to the Digital Literacy along with the different framework (e.g the seven elements of digital literacy) was an eye opener for me. I learned most while doing the research on “finding the key criteria for assessing digital literacy for tertiary students”. In my research I have found that there is a lack of assessment tools in this area, in particular for assessing 21st century learning skills like critical thinking, problem solving and creativity. The LiDA courses can be used to address these challenges in the tertiary level as it has been already been adopted at Thomas Edison State University as a micro-course.

Conclusion Now I have a firm grasp on different skill sets for digital literacy and about some of the associated tools related to developing digital literacy.

Plan: My future plan would be to investigate more about devising assessment tools that can effectively assess the 21st century skill sets for tertiary students. I will continue my research on this topic and will write a research article for publishing in a journal. In order to do so I will adopt some of the principles from Mike Caulfield’s book to evaluate the 1st year students.

I will also use the hypothesis.is tool to foster collaborative learning among my students. In that way they will be able to engage in active learning in a topic relevant to the courses they are enrolled.

 

 

 

 


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