Prioritizing Digital Literacy in Higher Ed
Capturing the inspiration at the 2019 Adobe Creative Campus in San Jose.
The evolution of digital literacy and its rapid rise in higher education has become an area more institutions are looking at to improve student success and develop the critical skills students need when graduating into a transformed digital workforce.
As higher education institutions continue to develop strategies to better prepare students for the evolving modern workforce, educational leaders must support faculty, and faculty must cultivate digital literacy in themselves and their classrooms. Here are some key factors to consider for fostering digital literacy as learned at the 2019 Adobe Creative Campus in San Jose, California, April 8-10.
Improved student experience in learning
Today’s students are more in tune with how they expect to learn new skills. Fostering digital literacy in the classroom empowers students to become knowledge creators versus just knowledge and information consumers. It crosses all disciplines, whether those courses are in the sciences, liberal arts, humanities, business, engineering, or anything in between.
Valentina Arismendi, a University of
With a learning experience driven by digital tools, Valentina created personalized projects and an attractive digital portfolio to help her succeed in a future profession.
“It’s all been implicit learning — effortless,” she said. As part of Generation Z, “no one really taught us how to use a website or a mobile app. Somehow we figured out how to use everything.”
Her digital skills have also allowed her to collaborate outside of the classroom. For example, Valentina’s friend and classmate had a business idea, and Valentina was able to use her digital skills to create the brand guide, wireframe, and more using Adobe XD.
“Adobe products have transformed the way I’ve learned inside the classroom,” Valentina said.
Pat Steenland, a member of the writing faculty at UC Berkeley, is fostering digital literacy in her students, some who are considered academically vulnerable, by helping them use digital technologies to enhance their learning experiences.
“We bring students into a relationship,” Pat said. “We give them the tools and also intellectual connection.” The right tools plus intellectual guidance give students the skills they need to dig deep. They pursue primary sources and end up discovering much more than they felt they could in a traditional essay.
How a digital foundation can work in tandem with traditional teaching models
The top three skills in demand in the modern workplace are complex problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity, said Todd Taylor, associate chair and director of the writing program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But is the educational experience helping students develop these skills? That depends.
“Majors don’t lead to careers in most cases,” said Vincent Del Casino, interim senior vice provost at the University of Arizona. “A lot of engineers I graduated with went to work as stockbrokers. But that doesn’t account for other skills students are developing. Teaching and learning happen everywhere in the university environment. It’s about soft skills.”
Considering that the No. 1 priority for 4,000 professionals surveyed by LinkedIn was soft skills training, it’s worth considering that traditional lectures may not always be the only appropriate teaching method.
“The way we use to do things isn’t adding up anymore,” Todd said. “What we want to focus on is putting tools in the hands of students.”
It’s about switching the mindset from digital technologies as tools to digital technologies as instruments. While tools are used to get the job done, instruments can be used to see the world differently, Todd said. And while lectures deliver information, fostering digital literacy prepares students with the skills they need for the transforming workplace. Together, traditional teaching methods with a foundation of digital literacy prepare students with needed soft skills such as creativity.
If creativity has risen as the most important soft skill students need, how can faculty encourage the divergent or creative thinking required in the modern workplace?
Like switching from a tools mindset to an
“You have a bag with a series of tools,” he said during his keynote address-turned-creative-activity. “Scissors, paper, crayons, glue stick. With these tools, interpret a flower [rather than create a flower]. It’s easier to interpret than create. Interpreting doesn’t create boundaries around what [the process or product] should be. Flowers are all different. And every creation is really an interpretation anyway.”
Scanning the variety of projects created by the attendees — some three-dimensional, some artistically drawn, and one even portraying a bag of enriched flour — Vincent pointed out how no two interpretations were the same, yet all were equally creative and fulfilled the assignment. An apt illustration of how, using the same tools, students will inevitably create something entirely different from their classmates.
How can educational leaders set an institution’s vision to incorporate digital literacy?
“Students demonstrate that a university education is so much more than the courses they take,” said Vincent. “Their education is also about the relationships they build, the experiences they create, and the struggles in which they engage.”
This perspective may present a challenge for faculty — how can they balance grading fairly, creating a positive student experience, and assigning challenging work?
“The future of where we are going to go is being tested,” said Vincent. “How is… the support we provide to faculty preparing students for what the workplace will be like when they graduate?”
One way to create an environment in which digital literacy can thrive is by allowing faculty the flexibility to re-evaluate the way they grade, making sure it supports the institution’s digital literacy goals. This may mean being stricter in some areas and more lenient in others; but no matter what it ends up meaning for your institution, faculty need to know it’s OK to make changes.
Another way to create a digital
This invitation acts as a catalyst for fostering digital literacy across disciplines. For example, in UNC first-year English courses, students are taught to write in multiple modalities, and faculty are encouraged to focus on the student experience.
Fostering that multi-modal learning, faculty should then rethink the way they grade and encourage creativity in their students.
Faculty are encouraged to cultivate digital literacy in themselves
Who better to foster digital literacy in students than digitally literate faculty? The Creative Campus event was full of ideas of how faculty can cultivate digital literacy in themselves. Here are a few:
- Self-reflect. Marcio A. Olivera, assistant vice president of academic technology and innovation at the University of Maryland, began videotaping his lectures. This helped him see the weaknesses in his teaching and identify how he could improve. It also emphasized the importance of classroom time which he now calls “UnGoogleable Moments,” where students can ask him more technical questions, leading to more refined problem-solving skills.
- Allow mobile devices in the classroom. Kyle Bowen, director of innovation at Penn State University, said one way to fully empower digital fluency for a 21st-century learner is to actively encourage student BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) into the classroom. With apps like Adobe Premiere Rush, Photoshop Express, and Spark Post, mobile phones can be used to create 15-minute, in-class projects.
- Have students dig deep. Pat’s method is to have students take a single topic and use resources found on campus to dive deep into that topic. The UC Berkeley library, for example, has vast resources about Japanese internment camps, and her students learn a great deal — even becoming deeply connected — to these primary sources. Once the research is done, Pat offers her students the opportunity to either write a traditional research paper or use Adobe Spark to create a website, like this one created by Neesha Chockalingam, to creatively display their work.
- Cultivate your own digital practice. Students were the accelerators to get the software [Adobe Creative Cloud], said Jean Cheng, program manager at UC Berkeley’s Academic Innovation Studio. Now it’s a matter of faculty learning to use these tools. Rather than taking the digital literacy journey at a sprint, treat it like yoga: a practice you pick up every day, that you are always improving, and never finished learning.
- Do things with students instead of doing things to students, said Todd. Put tools in the hands of students, and focus on their experience. Todd suggests creating digital maker spaces on campus, studios where students can create and collaborate.
- Learn from your students. Dr. Karla Fisher, vice chancellor and provost of Maricopa Community Colleges, notes that students have been training the faculty. The New Media Labs at Mesa Community College have introduced a disruptive process to traditional English classes, she said. As students have helped faculty become more digitally literate, they have balanced the generation gap, helped faculty confront technophobia, found funding, gained institutional support, and produced excellent projects.
When students graduate from our institutions, we want them to have the power to use digital tools to solve problems, create innovative projects, and enhance communications. We want them to be prepared for the digital transformation happening in the workplace. The life-changing power of digital literacy is becoming more important, building on the skills students are learning and creating a personalized learning experience for each one. As Vincent said, “A university education is so much more than the courses [students] take. It’s about the relationships they build, the experiences they create, and the struggles in which they engage.”
As institutions continue to prioritize digital literacy, it’s important to continually create a culture where digital literacy can thrive. What would this culture look like? Cultures supportive of digital literacy embrace flexibility, look forward to the future, and allow mistakes. They focus on student experience, combine traditional with nontraditional methods, and encourage faculty to improve their own digital literacy. When institutions foster digital literacy by creating a culture where it can thrive, their students will be ready for the evolving workplace.