Digital and Online Learning (DOL) and innovation in teaching and learning are not the same thing. Innovation in teaching and learning means introducing new processes, objectives, resources, approaches or relations into teaching and learning. DOL does not necessarily include something new. Transferring instructional materials into digital format and making them accessible online may or may not lead to changes in teaching and learning and, what is more important, those changes may impact negatively or positively upon learning outcomes and the welfare of educators and learners. Sometimes DOL has helped, as during the COVID lockdown to provide a minimal, nevertheless essential continuation of education, as for example with the uploading and broadcasting of video lessons. On other occasions, DOL has been used to try to reproduce conventional classroom teaching in a new environment, as for example in synchronous video teaching.
However, DOL can go further, leading to activity that does not just fill a gap, but which leads to innovation that produces benefits for educators and for learners. For example, DOL can lead to more individualized teaching, more stimulating learning resources, more interactions between learners and more formative assessment. During the previous year and a half of the COVID pandemic the whole world of education had gone online. Mainly the face-to-face activities were adapted to online environments. We have seen much DOL used as ‘sticking plaster’, but we have also seen many schools and educators exploring DOL to improve teaching and learning; we have witnessed some interesting innovations.
Some educators have used DOLs to help students to learn at their own pace: to complete tasks in their own time, to go back to review or redo tasks or to follow different paths or exercises in order to achieve their learning. Innovative DOL materials can allow student-centered learning and opportunities for individual and differentiated learning. Furthermore, DOLs can improve access to learning to disadvantaged, hard-to-reach and special needs learners by providing ’accessible materials, complementing text with video and audio, that can be used on different platforms, according to the user’s preferred time and pace. Using DOLs will enable greater inclusiveness in education to different learners and will allow each student to have a possibility to reach own individual potential.
DOL materials can be very beneficial in assessment too. Students can take digital tests or quizzes and receive feedback instantly. At the same time, the educator will receive and can analyse data about their students’ progress and will be able to adapt the future activities accordingly. Increasingly, A.I. programmes can adapt digital tasks in the light of this analysis. DOL helps educators and learners to create more differentiated learning programmes, where the learning steps correspond to the progress and the difficulties that learners encounter. However, recent research conducted by ETF shows that although DOL materials in digital assessment have high potential, it has been one of the least used DOL technologies over the last 12 months. Research has been calling for more formative assessment for many years and now DOL and COVID provide the opportunity to do just this. However, it is easier said than done. There are a lot of prerequisites: access to computers, suitable software, assessment instruments, and protocols for analysis. Specific professional development activities should be developed for educators to be able to prepare and implement DOL assessment materials/activities.
Take-up, sharing and successful use of DOL materials face another obstacle that should be overcome: language barrier. The majority of digital resources and tools are in English so most educators and students are disadvantaged. In order to use the full potential of DOL and be able to innovate the teaching and learning, conditions should be created for preparation of various digital tools/activities in the mother tongue. International collaboration between educators can help them to discover what resources exist in other languages and how benefit from them. Improving machine translation and fully open education resources (that can be translated) can help.
At the end of 2020, ETF have conducted research on Digital Competences of the educators in secondary education. The findings in North Macedonia, where I live, are that almost 70% of Macedonian educators have frequently used Virtual classroom software (e.g. MS Teams, Google Classroom, Moodle) and 60% of Macedonian educators were frequently using Synchronous video-communication tools (e.g. Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook live). These numbers are little bit higher than regional average - 65% of educators from the South East Europe region have frequently used Virtual classroom software and 55% educators from the region were frequently using Synchronous video-communication tools. These findings reveal how far educators progressed in 12 months and it also shows us the limits. We can be proud of what our educators have achieved, but also aware of the potential for successful innovation still to be achieved. We should not forget the incredible work burden involved in the take-up of DOL. Clearly, in their future, educators need to be supported to work together – in their schools, but also from school to school to better understand and realise the possibilities for innovation.
Please share your views on innovation and DOL. For example:
- Have you had positive or negative experiences of innovating with DOL?
- How have you learnt about good practice in using DOL in your teaching and learning?
- What kinds of DOL do you think are most exciting for your learners?
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There is now a massive commitment in Europe and beyond for digitilisation - I learnt in the #SELFIE_Forum2021 today that both Slovenia and Portugal are planning major investments in resources, teacher training and educational digital projects
In the past year and half there has been a lot of capacity building for teachers in order to meet the requirements of shift to online environment because of the pandemic. But that was retroactive reaction. Now we need proactive investment in resources and teachers' capacities in order to use all existing potential (human and material) with innovative approaches in teaching and learning.
Totally agree, investments should be future-oriented. That is why keeping on training educators through (online or offline) lessons might not be the best way. Courses and lessons come to an end eventually, while digital update of capacities must be continuous.
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