Teaching – Page 4 – Digital Learning Dispatches

On Thursday 18th of November, the official DigiTeL Pro launch took place. This collaborative European funded project began earlier in the year with the aim of bringing together a team of experts from several universities, well-known for their research and leading-edge innovation in digital education.

A major feature of the launch was an overview of three new online professional learning courses designed for higher educators. Each course, listed below, explores a different mode or dimension of digital education. Together they aim to support European educators to build their teaching skills and professional capabilities for digital education relevant to their particular interests and institutional contexts.

Course 1: Synchronous and Hybrid Education

Learn more about the course, view a brief presentation and complete the registration form

Course 2: Blending Your Education

Learn more about the course, view a brief presentation and complete the registration form

Course 3: Online Education

Learn more about the course, view a brief presentation and complete the registration for

We invite you to register for these course and/or to share relevant details within your professional networks.

As part of the DigiTeL Pro launch event, we also provided a brief update on DCU’s free course, A Digital Edge: Essentials for the Online Learner, offered through FutureLearn. This course, co-facilitated by students and originally supported by IUA and the DCU Students’ Union, has so far attracted over 10,000 students worldwide with a completion rate of over 50%. Over 2,000 DCU students have claimed full certificates of completion. The course was a direct response to the COVID crisis and focuses on developing student readiness for online learning. It completes the suite of offerings supported by DigiTeL Pro.

To further infuse a strong student readiness dimension across and throughout all four courses, the NIDL team has undertaken a literature review to help answer the following questions:

What research has been published reporting student readiness for online distance learning during the COVID crisis?
How strong is the “learner voice” in COVID-related research reporting on student readiness for online distance learning?
What lessons can be taken from the COVID-related literature on student readiness for new models of digital education?

A report of this research will be published in the New Year, but we can already conclude from our analysis that there is limited evidence of previous literature on student readiness informing the COVID response. Secondly, although numerous national and institutional surveys have been published over the past 18 months, which report on the COVID experience, the vast majority of this research does not adequately convey the student voice. Hence, this suggests that, with a handful of exceptions, an important gap remains in the literature which tells the students’ lived experience in their own words.

The above video provides a full recording of the DigiTeL Pro launch event. We look forward to sharing further information in 2022 on this project which is being led by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU).

During the early stages of the pivot to online assessments, an ASCILITE seminar led by Griffith University, Australia, introduced the Teaching Enhancement Unit (TEU) to interactive oral assessments. As designing robust assessments that could quality assure students’ learning was a key priority during the transition to online assessment, this seminar sparked a light.

It led to early discussions, and ultimately a collaboration between DCU TEU and Griffith University to pilot interactive oral assessments in DCU. This collaboration quickly became a Community of Practice (CoP) where a small group of DCU academics across all five faculties began using interactive oral assessments as a viable alternative to traditional assessments. The CoP changes over each semester, with some new recruits, some past members dipping in and out, and some staying throughout the three semesters this CoP and pilot has been running.

Interactive orals are an authentic assessment approach that effectively helps prepare students for employment, and when used as part of strategically designed integrated assessment, promotes academic integrity. This short 2 minute video provides a quick introduction to the approach through the voices of both DCU students and academics involved in the initiative.

A TEU Interactive Oral User Guide is also available to support academics wishing to use this approach. The DCU CoP are at an advanced stage of a research article to share experiences… watch this space.

An exciting enhancement to the DCU Interactive Oral CoP is a shared Interactive Oral CoP with Griffith University and Charles Sturt University in Australia. The first meeting was held on 24th November 2021, hosted by the TEU. At a two-hour meeting, over twenty academics (8 from DCU) presented vignettes of their use of interactive oral across all disciplines. This shared CoP will continue to meet twice a year to collaborate and share experience and research in this space.

If you would like any more information on this initiative or are interested in joining the CoP, please email fiona.m.oriordan@dcu.ie