Adobe Education blog post: NMC Strategic Brief, Part 2
New NMC brief underscores the need for higher education institutions to incorporate digital literacy across all disciplines.
By Karen McCavitt, Group Manager, Worldwide Marketing for Education Enterprise at Adobe
New Media Consortium (NMC) just released Digital Literacy in Higher Education, Part II: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief, and it’s a must-read for higher education leaders looking to create effective digital literacy initiatives on their campuses.
Commissioned by Adobe, the independent research examines how educators and administrators view digital literacy. It also shows how they can help their students learn, create, and communicate in modern ways with digital content — and develop the critical-thinking and creative problem-solving skills employers value. The brief offers the following:
- An expanded definition of digital literacy that emphasizes the role of learners as creators and examines inequalities of access based on economics, gender, race, and political divides
- Examples of successful programs that empower students to hone their digital literacy skills and prepare for the workforce
- Digital literacy frameworks and examples from Europe, Africa, North America, Australia, and the Middle East
- Ten views of digital literacy from international experts
- A look at the future of digital literacy and the influence of technologies and phenomena like virtual reality, blockchain, automation, and fake news
The report emphasizes the need for higher-education leaders to approach students as creative thinkers and storytellers and help students build out their digital literacy skills in all subjects — including the sciences, the humanities, and business courses.
Adobe fully supports these efforts. We’re committed to empowering educators with the creative tools they need to enhance their students’ academic experiences and to teach the critical thinking, digital literacy, and problem-solving skills their students need to succeed in the digital economy.
To that end, we offer teaching and learning tools, modules, rubrics, and student examples through our Adobe for Academics site within the Adobe Education Exchange. The site shows how institutions like Clemson University, the University of Southern California, the George Washington University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have incorporated digital literacy into a wide range of courses and assignments with Adobe Creative Cloud.
We encourage everyone in higher education to read the NMC brief, which is available online, free of charge, under a Creative Commons license for easy duplication and distribution.