Week 5:  Teaching and digital scholarship

Introduction

Having looked at the creation of digital content as part of the core activities of a university it is time to look at one of those core activities. In this week you will be introduced to the last of Boyer’s scholarly activities, and arguably the one most directly affected by digital scholarship, namely teaching. Digital scholarship allows educators to include different resources in their teaching, to use different pedagogic approaches, and to teach different audiences. The learner can engage with different types of content, communicate with people all over the globe, and produce new types of output.

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Transcript: Week 5 introduction

Martin Weller

This week, we focus on teaching – the last and arguably the most significant of Boyer’s categories. Digital scholarship is influencing every aspect of teaching, from online content such as open-education resources and the development of entire online courses – so-called MOOCs – to the use of online databases in the humanities, new pedagogic approaches, and new ways of collaborating. In fact, using digital technology in teaching is a topic that really deserves a course of its own.

So you won’t look at specific methods or tools in this week. Instead, I want to consider how the nature of teaching as a recent model of scarcity and what a shift to abundance means. What is the best approach to take advantage of this?

We’ll also look at MOOCs, an area that’s seen a lot of interest, hype, anxiety, and investment. It’s often difficult to separate the possible benefits and issues with such approaches from the rhetoric. In that sense, MOOCs are a good example of the type of development that we will see increasingly as technology promises to solve every problem. Deciding where such developments can actually be usefully applied will be a key skill for a digital scholar.

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Week 5 introduction

By the end of this week you will have:

• ained an understanding of different pedagogies and how they can take advantage of abundant content
• begun to appreciate the influence of the recent MOOC development.