Behind the curtain of this new instructional delivery mechanism there is a vibrant research community digging deeply to understand how scaled-up education environments can help us learn new things about teaching, learning, and education.
Empowering faculty with knowledge in this area while supporting copyright awareness will result in more engaging and powerful U-M MOOCs, more robust pedagogical experimentation, and legal remixing and reuse of digital content across a variety of on-campus and online courses.
This is about designing environments where students are encouraged to focus less on their final grades, and more on the craft of learning; where they are motivated to face down the very real struggles of mastering challenging new material, but persist day after day and are able to see progress; where they take responsibility for their learning, and make self-aware choices regarding how they can best learn and be assessed on their development of content mastery.
To have any meaningful learning objectives, I need to know who I am teaching. So I survey the students for their interests, background, preferences, and whatever else they want to tell me.
The digital nature of these certifications allow rich metadata about the specific setting, requirements, and the learners’ own evidence to travel with the badge. This provides students with an avenue for personalized and reflective learning at specific and contextualized moments over time.
Being able to reuse digital content created for one purpose in a different course with an entirely different group of learners than those for whom it was initially intended, to support learning objectives in a very different context, has been invaluable.
It’s all a little less scary if we take a step back and think about what it is we’re really doing – learning from experience, understanding the past. Educators don’t learn about the past to predict the future; we learn about the past to change the future.
From the beginning, DEI has sought out answers to the following question: what is only possible at a great public residential research university? We decided early on that part of being a public institution is making a commitment to share our journey as we go. And we already have much to share.
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