How can digital media be used in higher education of the 21st century?
In the debate on digital technologies, stereotypes are often produced that in turn generalize notions of automatic improvement and better performance. But not every traditional course is hierchical, and not every digital innovation leads to collective and distributed learning. A collaborative project, at the junction of research and teaching, investigates this by focusing on the creation of smaller case studies that are diverse and shift away from a one-size-fits-all teaching concept towards the individualization of teaching. Thus, existing clichés dissolve, such as the view that digital innovation automatically means progress. This project attempts to oppose the supposed digital-turn and, in the sense of an additive form of knowledge generation, create spaces of possibility in which digital and analog, as well as experimental and established teaching methods, correlate and complement each other.
Learning from doing, sharing what has been learned
Called ILTI (Innovative Learning & Teaching Initiative), this project seeks to foster enhanced learning activities at the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, based on shared pedagogical experiences and research-based insights, by blending media-based approaches with face-to-face interactive classroom methods. Our approach is collaborative, aiming to accompany instructors while augmenting existing courses, to design innovative teaching scenarios, and to motivate the creation of inspiring examples and opportunities for the university community. To inspire a self-sustaining network of practitioners, ILTI will gather and showcase exemplars of inspiring tech-enhanced practices from our own instructors on a special website: www.digital-learning.lu.
At the same time, ILTI acts as a second order observatory, recording general insights into the connection between digitalisation and teaching and bringing them into dialogue with other research projects at the faculty. Insights are initially collected on an empirical level, for example by statistically evaluating the learning behaviour of students and observing teaching success over a long-term perspective. At the theoretical level, central concepts of blended learning are to be reformulated and revised by linking them to specific (e.g., disciplinary) application scenarios.