E-learning and Digital Cultures

E-learning and Digital Cultures isaimed at teachers, learning technologists, and people with a general interestin education who want to deepen their understanding of what it means to teachand learn in the digital age. The course is about how digital culturesintersect with learning cultures online, and how our ideas about onlineeducation are shaped through “narratives”, or big stories, about therelationship between people and technology. We’ll explore some of the mostengaging perspectives on digital culture in its popular and academic forms, andwe’ll consider how our practices as teachers and learners are informed by thedifference of the digital. We’ll look at how learning and literacy isrepresented in popular digital-, (or cyber-) culture, and explore how thatconnects with the visions and initiatives we are seeing unfold in ourapproaches to digital education.

This course will not be taught via aseries of video lectures. Rather, a selection of rich resources will be providedthrough which you can begin to engage with the themes of the course. While theteachers will be present in the discussion forums and in various other mediaenvironments, there will be an emphasis on learner-led group formation, and theuse of social media to build personal learning networks and communities ofpeers. On this course, you will be invited to think critically and creativelyabout e-learning both as a process and as a topic of study; you will be able totry out new ideas in a supportive environment, and gain fresh perspectives onyour own experiences of teaching and learning.  This course is also intended to be an exploration  of the MOOC format itself.  Rather than approaching this course with the expectation of exacting teaching methods or precise learning routines, we invite all participants to collectively experiment with what the MOOC experience might be.

The course assessment will involve youcreating your own digital artefact: something that is designed to beexperienced digitally, on the web. It will be likely to contain a mixture of text,image, sound, video, links, and can be created in the environment of yourchoice. The artefact will be a representation of any of the themes encountered during the course, and you‘ll havethe opportunity to use digital spaces in new ways to present this work. Ourdefinition of ‘digital artefact’ is intentionally imprecise to inviteexperimentation and creativity: it will be evaluated via guided peer-assessment.

This course has been developed collaboratively by a team of experienced teachers and researchers in online education, who run the international MSc in Digital Education distance programme at the University of Edinburgh.