I’m really delighted to be running this 15 credit module  as part of the Masters in Academic Practice for the fourth year running, so welcome to my new cohort at City University. This year I am delighted to be joined by a new member of the academic team at City, Dr Julie Voce, who is also Head of Digital Education. For those who are not at City, but who would like a taste of the module you are very welcome to join the webinar series. I have also made information available about the teaching days and the reading list from the blog.

Digital Literacies and Open Practice is an opportunity for staff and LIS students to explore two important and inter-related issues, that are central to the role that technology plays in education. It has been particularly interesting to discuss these issues in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to online learning. The importance of considering your own, but also your students’ digital literacies has been only too apparent over the past 18 months. I have regularly had discussions with staff who made assumptions about what students might already know, about how to use technology and how to behave online. I think the need to embed digital literacies into the curriculum are now more important than ever before.

And the crisis has also highlighted the value of open practice, whether it’s about sharing teaching resources, helping students get access to digitised or electronic key readings, and the need for open access research. Last year I signed the Open COVID pledge, to try and be open in the work I write and publish.  I’ve also been running regular webinars for the education community on copyright and online learning, with my research partner, Chris Morrison. Chris will once again be delivering the first webinar in the series associate with this module.

I hope you can join some of this module and if you would like to understand a bit more about the rationale behind it and the feedback from the first cohorts, then I have published the paper I presented just a few weeks before lockdown at the INTED Conference in Valencia in March 2020.  I am looking forward to this module starting again and to sharing my passion for digital literacies and open practice with anyone interested, wherever they might be in the world.