Collections

Digital Futures for Learning

During the Digital Futures for Learning course in 2017/18, participants created Open Educational Resources (OERs), taking the three course themes as a starting point. A selection of these OERs are available.

Courses

23 Things for Digital Knowledge (CC BY)

An award-winning, open, and self-paced course for digital and online skills. 23 Things for Digital Knowledge provides a structured way for staff and students to set aside that time to build up skills and experiment with new digital tools.

Textbooks

The Asynchronous Cookbook (CC BY-NC-SA)

Whether you’re teaching mostly in person but looking for some regular, asynchronous activities to add to your course, or teaching a fully online course, this resource is for you. The activities in this cookbook draw on research and good practice in online course design to provide recipes – concise and specific instructions and examples – for adding asynchronous activities to a course. Meaningful interaction between students and instructors is a key ingredient in all of these recipes.

Ethical Use of Technology in Digital Learning Environments: Graduate Student Perspectives (CC BY)

This book is the result of a co-design project in a class in the Masters of Education program at the University of Calgary. The course, and the resulting book, focus primarily on the safe and ethical use of technology in digital learning environments. The course was organized according to four topics based on Farrow’s (2016) Framework for the Ethics of Open Education.

Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction (CC BY-NC-ND)

This book addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. The authors address issues of inclusive and accessible writing instruction (based upon physical and mental disability, linguistic ability, and socioeconomic challenges) in technology enhanced settings.

Guide to Blended Learning (CC BY-SA)

This is an introduction using technology and distance education teaching strategies with traditional, face-to-face classroom activities. This Guide has been designed to assist teachers adopt blended learning strategies through a step-by-step approach taking constructivist and design-based approach and reflecting on decisions taken to provide authentic learning experience in their own contexts. This book is from the Commonwealth of Learning.

Liberated Learners (CC BY-NC)

Following in the footsteps of the Ontario Extend: Empowered Educator program is its predecessor, Ontario Extend: Liberated Learners. The original program worked to prepare educators to be better able to teach in a digital realm. The Liberated Learner seeks to do the same for the learners themselves. As such, the project has four modules: The Learner, The Navigator, The Collaborator, and The Technologist. Taken together, the modules aim to enable a well-rounded and ready-for-almost-anything post-secondary learner.

Teaching with Rich Media: A Guide for Online Instructors (CC BY-SA)

Online instructors need a framework for “teaching beyond text” using rich media as instructional resources. This book defines rich media, its affordances, and its value in conveying information. The book offers a model for pedagogical strategies, a set of instructor competencies, and two models for assessment for use in professional development.

Technology, Media Literacy, and the Human Subject: A Posthuman Approach (CC BY)

What does it mean to be media literate in today’s world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technological medium—how it enables and constrains both messages and media users. Additionally, there is often little attention paid to the broader context of interrelations which affect our engagement with media technologies.

This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology. The author argues persuasively that the increased awareness provided by this posthuman approach affords us a greater chance for reclaiming some of our agency and provides a sound foundation upon which we can then judge our media relations. This book will be an indispensable tool for educators in media literacy and media studies, as well as academics in philosophy of technology, media and communication studies, and the post-humanities.

Videos

Near Future Teaching (CC BY)

A collection of videos featuring students and staff talking about what changes they predict, or would like to see, in teaching over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift.

Websites

Education and the Blockchain (CC BY-SA)

The blockchain is considered by some people to be The Next Big Thing in higher education. For example, it is claimed that it will “reinvent higher education” (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2017), that it might “hasten the dissolution of universities as institutions” (Matthews, 2017). In this OER, we’ll learn more about these claims, why they may or may not be justified, and how we might become better equipped to analyse potential blockchain projects in higher education from a critical perspective.

Radical Digital Literacy (CC BY)

This resource is based on the idea that current approaches to digital literacy in most Higher Education institutions are simplistic and fail to take into account that technology is not a neutral entity. This OER provides a number of resources to read and watch with the aim of providing a springboard to discuss and share ideas of how to integrate a more radical approach to digital literacy into an undergraduate curriculum.

Serendipity in a Digital World (CC BY)

This resource explores the concept of Serendipity in a Digital World. Looking at the rise of algorithms, control online and how this can affect experiences of serendipity and exploration, open and closed spaces online, and how to balance, maintain, and encourage connections. The resource has been created primarily for education professionals and Masters-level students working in fields such as digital education, learning technology, digital futures, and e-learning.