Category Archives: Course aims

Welcome to Digital Literacies and Open Practice 2024-5

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I can’t believe we are about to start this module again for the sixth time as the module was first created in 2018. How time flies! We have a new cohort of students, and I’ve just completed some research on the impact of teaching on this module. The findings about what staff think of their own and their students’ digital literacies are really interesting and going to be the subject of a LEaD Learning Circle event in November. We also collected data on their attitudes towards open educational practices. Watch this space as I have also just submitted the first of a few planned journal articles on this research.

Definitions and terminology are both topics for discussion in next week’s first teaching day. I am really looking forward to meeting the new cohort, as this continues to be a really fascinating area to teach (and do research) in. We’ve got some introductory reading on what are digital literacies (from AdvanceHE) and a similar short piece on what open educational practices are from University of Edinburgh. A key part of the day is also going to be learning about where understanding copyright fits in this whole process and we have a link to last year’s guest lecture from Chris Morrison as he sadly can’t join us next week. But, it’s going to be a great term and good luck to everyone taking the module!

Heading to the European Conference on Information Literacy

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Sign saying come in we are open

Photo by Richard Balog on Unsplash

Next week I will be in Krakow, Poland for the European Conference on Information Literacy and I am really excited to be speaking about the impact that this module has on staff attitudes and their academic practices. My session takes place on Monday afternoon and is part of a series of papers about Information Literacy Education. The module primarily focuses on digital literacy and open educational practices, but in my view these are both very much part of information literacy teaching and I am really looking forward to sharing my experiences with the conference delegates. I’ve not been to ECIL for a few years but it’s a fantastic supportive community of educators.

I’m really looking forward to sharing my experience of teaching this module over the past 6 years and also reporting on some of the research I have been undertaking over the summer with my colleague Dr Luis Pereira. We’ve been investigating staff attitudes to both digital literacy and open practices and particularly have been focusing on the impact that the pandemic has had on staff. I’ll be sharing my slides soon, but this builds on research I undertook in 2019 and presented at the Inted 2020 conference in Valencia. This was written up for the conference proceedings and is available on open access.

I’m also looking forward to the module starting again on 20th October 2023, when I have a new cohort joining the course including students from the Masters in Academic Practice at City and Library and Information Science students. I’m so grateful to all the fantastic guest speakers that join me each year and a list of these is available from the webinar page. I wish you all the best for the new academic year!

Sharing my student assignments openly!

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Copyright literacy cakes

This year for the first time I modified the assessment for the module EDM122 to require students to publish their final assignment openly on a blog. Over the next few days I will release most of these assignments in a series of blog posts from the 2022/23 cohort. It was also a requirement to add an open licence to the work and to explain why they’d chosen the licence they did. This change has really helped students engage more fully with developing their digital literacies but also thinking about how open licensing works.

I’m so delighted that they agreed to do this and I really hope you enjoy reading about different aspects of digital literacy and open practice and how it relates to their practice.

I also hope to be starting some further research into staff attitudes towards digital literacy and open practice over the coming months.

Digital Literacies and Open Practice webinars 2022/23

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Photo of Jane Secker, woman with blond hair wearing a black jacket

Dr Jane Secker, Module Tutor, EDM122

I can’t believe the term is going so quickly and EDM122 is now half way through! This post is a little later than planned as I recently took over as Programme Director for City’s Masters in Academic Practice, as well as the module lead for EDM122 Digital Literacies and Open Practice. I am teaching this course again with my colleague, Dr Julie Voce who is Head of Digital Education at City.

There have been some changes to the module, including an additional teaching day has been adding. The four teaching days are supplemented by webinars which includes an amazing line up of guest speakers who are all experts in their field. This year the webinars mainly take place during the teaching days and so guests are welcome to watch the recordings, but can’t join these sessions live. A couple of the sessions have also been pre-recorded. Our experience in previous years was a relatively small number of people wanted to join live, however please drop us a line if you have any questions or are very keen to join a session.

The schedule for webinars for 2022/2023 is as follows:

  • 12th October 2022 – Chris Morrison, Copyright and Licensing Specialist, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Digital literacy, copyright and open practices.
  • 2nd November 2022 – Jenny Scoles, Academic Developer (Learning & Teaching Enhancement), Institute for Academic Development, The University of Edinburgh. Blogging as Academic Practice.
  • 2nd November 2022 – Lauren Regan, Digital capability and City students & Geraldine Foley, Digital Capability and City staff.
  • 23rd November 2022 – Lorna Campbell, University of Edinburgh and Catherine Cronin, Open Education Practices.
  • December 20223 – Claire Wotherspoon and Catriona. Embedding Digital literacy in the curriculum.

So far we have got four recordings available and I will be adding the recordings and slides to the webinar page in due course and keeping this up to date. It’s hard to believe, but this is the fifth year of running the module and we have the largest cohort yet taking the course in 2022/23.

Welcome to EDM122 2022/23

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Come in we are open sign

Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash

Welcome to the new academic year and the fifth time I’ve run this module (yes it’s hard to believe I know but I started this module in October 2018 when the world was a different place). I’ve also made some changes to the module this year to reflect a few issues that have arisen from previous cohorts. The assignments have been slightly modified. Students now have to tackle both topic (digital literacies and open practice) in their 2 assignments. So if they choose to make a video about digital literacy then they need to write their essay on open practices. Or visa versa. I’ve also integrated the webinars far more into the teaching days. And there are now 4 teaching days including 3 online and one on campus. Finally the second assignment, the essay, now needs to be published with an appropriate open licence on it. So you may well start to see these appearing on this blog, or on another platform chosen by the students.

As ever I am delighted to have guests joining us for the webinars. If you would like to attend one of these sessions then please do drop me a line. Further details of the speakers are below but all the sessions are going to be recorded:

  • Wednesday 12th October 2022: Chris Morrison, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Digital literacy, copyright and open practices.​
  • Pre-recorded video: Lauren Regan, Geraldine Foley and Elisabetta Lando, LEaD, Insights into City staff and student digital experiences. ​
  • Wednesday 2nd November 2022: Jenny Scoles, Academic Developer (Learning & Teaching Enhancement), Institute for Academic Development, The University of Edinburgh. Blogging as Academic Practice. ​
  • Wednesday 23rd November 2022: Lorna Campbell, University of Edinburgh and Catherine Cronin, National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Ireland, Open Education Practices.​
  • Tuesday 2nd December 2022: Claire Wotherspoon, Catriona and Jen, Open University, Embedding Digital literacy in the curriculum.​

Happy new term!

Welcome to EDM122: Digital Literacies and Open Practice 2021/2022

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Jane at INTED in ValenciaI’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.

Module starting in October 2020

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Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash

I’ll be delighted to teach this module for the third time starting in October 2020. It feels like there is an even greater need, as we’ve seen the rapid shift to online learning at City but also around the world in education, to consider our own and our students digital literacies and also our approach to openness in our practice. At the heart of this module is a critical approach to our own teaching, learning and research practices and I hope that it’s a chance to challenge assumptions we make about what we know, what our learners know and can do and who has power and authority within academia as well as within our disciplines.

If you are interested in any of these questions then do consider signing up to this module or following online as I shift the course online, and plan to release the teaching materials openly and licensed under Creative Commons. As ever I hope to line up a series of expert guest speakers so there will also be an open webinar series and I am planning to ask each of my speakers to reflect on their topic in light of the pandemic. I hope you will join me, either informally or by enrolling on the module and I am excited to teach on subjects I feel so passionate about and which I think are at the heart of higher education today.

Kicking off Digital Literacies and Open Practice 2019-2020

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Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash

I’m delighted that this module kicks off again on Thursday 17th October with a new cohort of keen participants. This year the module has also been offered to LIS Students at City and a few have opted to take the course, so they will be joining students on our MA in Academic Practice. I’m really looking forward to having their perspective and contributions. The one thing I really liked last year was allowing people to focus on the aspects of digital literacy and open practice that really appealed to them and to dig into the literature to inform their thinking. You could probably base an entire module on each concept, so trying to cover everything is really difficult, but I found myself wanting to add in more to my teaching materials and not take anything out when reviewing the slides last week!

Feedback last year for the module was really positive, so the pressure is on to keep the standard as high as before. I’ve had a really useful chat with colleagues Sam Aston and Chris Millson at University of Manchester, who teach their module Open Knowing in Higher Education. It was being invited to give a guest workshop as part of their module that really inspired me to create this module, so I hope I have been able to share some of my ideas with them as well.

I’ve also been overwhelmed with the support I’ve received from external colleagues who agreed to once again give up their time to be part of the webinar series. The webinars are open to everyone and the first of these will be on Tuesday 22nd October and given by copyright games enthusiast and policy expert Chris Morrison from the University of Kent – I’ll share a link to the Adobe Connect classroom next week on the blog again but here it is.

The full line up of webinars are on the website now and also you can still access the recordings from last year if you missed them. I’m using the hashtag #CityDLOP if anyone wants to tweet about the module and I have just about got my Moodle site up and running. So wish me luck!

EDM122: Digital Literacies and Open Practice coming soon!

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Technology has had an enormous impact on the way we teach and the way we learn. In this new module, you will examine the the evolution of digital technologies and their impact in HE, investigate debates and evidence about the effects on teaching and learning, examines the digital tools which are used to support teaching, learning, research and administration and the developments might occur in the foreseeable future. It provides you with the opportunity to reflect critically on the issues raised by the increasing implementation of technology in HE both globally and within your own context and to explore what both digital literacies and open practice means in the context of your work.

This new 15 credit module is part of the MA in Academic Practice at City, University of London. It is taught by Dr Jane Secker, Senior Lecturer in Educational Development and the course will be starting in October 2018. The course is taught face to face through 3 full day teaching session, with online learning support via webinars, Moodle and the course blog.

On completing this course you will be able to:

  • evaluate how technology creates both opportunities for innovation and challenges in learning and teaching practice and to consider how to integrate technologies into current learning and teaching strategies in an effective manner;
  • analyse the use of digital resources appropriate to the content, audience and aims of your current courses;
  • develop transferrable skills, including your own digital literacies and how to better support students in this area;
  • develop an understanding of open practices and reflect on what it means in your own context as a teacher and researcher.

To find out more and register see the City University MA in Academic Practice website. The course fee for this module is £600. However, the course blog will be available to everyone in the interests of open education. The webinar recordings will also be made available via the blog, in addition to further details about the course content.

All fees are waived for any City, University of London staff (including visiting lecturers) and current City PhD students. We are also able to offer a 25% reduction of fees for all staff from other member institutions of the University of London – although City staff will receive preference in the event of any capacity constraints.