Getting connected: Enhancing digital competences through curriculum

internationalization in higher education

Reflections on the New Digital Skills Agenda

2016 Digital skills in teaching and learning – are we on the right track?

Helga Dorner, Ph.D.Central European University, Budapest,

Hungary

New Skills Agenda for EuropePriorities for Action

1. Improving the quality and relevance of skills formation

2. Making skills and qualifications more visible and comparable

3. Improving skills intelligence and information for better career choices

European Commission (2016)

Beyond looking for the right occupation-specific skills, employers are increasingly demanding transferable skills, such as the ability to work in a team, creative thinking and problem solving. (…) Yet too little emphasis is usually placed on such skills in curricula (...). (European Commission, 2016)

Formal education and training should equip everyone with a broad range of skills (...). These include literacy, numeracy, science and foreign languages, as well as transversal skills and key competences such as digital competences, enterpreneurship, critical thinking, problem solving or learning to learn, and financial literacy. Some Member States have taken steps to incorporate them in curricula, this has not always been done consistently. (European Commission, 2016)

The European Digital Competence Framework (DigComp)

How to integrate these competences in teaching and learning in higher

education? A possible solution?Curriculum internationalization

“The incorporation of an international and intercultural dimension into the content of the curriculum as well as the teaching and learning processes and support services of a program of study” (Leask, 2009, p. 209).

Characteristics of internationalized curriculum • reflects the plurality of knowledge,

• engages students in critical inquiry of diverse sources and contexts of knowledge,

• requires a broader perspective to ‘course content’, that is, the strategic integration of pedagogies that support cross-cultural understanding, knowledge, skills and values that prepare students to rise to the challenge of being ‘successful’ in a complex, globalised world (Van Gyn, et al. 2009),

• reflects commitment to developing and supporting critical thinking and active student learning (Leask 2013).

How to get digital? A possible solution: Curriculum internationalization through online collaborations

The concept of curriculum internationalization has broadened to also include new perspectives on technological advances.

Students with virtual mobility (i.e. ICT and Internet access) can now be considered as international students and they can potentially have international learning experience if digital technologies are used to internationalise content and approaches to teaching and learning in the curriculum (Edwards & Teekens 2012; Leask 2004).

Intersections: digital competences, internationalization, discipline-specific

competences

Adapted from Leask (2004)

Telecollaborations (O’Dowd, 2013) where online activities and interaction with foreign partners are integrated into the in-class face-to-face activities served as a methodological precedent.

The international collaborative seminar (Dorner, 2016) is a university course involving two in-person learning communities located at two simultaneous teaching sites that collaborate through video-conferencing and asynchronous online work.

Additional definitions, such as polysynchronous learning (Dalgarno, 2014); blended synchronous learning (Bower et al., 2014;Szeto, 2015)

How to apply the model in practice?

How to integrate digital competences in internationalization outcomes?

• Synchronous and asynchronous online discussion groups that link students from different cultures to enable them to complete tasks, solve problems, gain international perspectives on issues, and to establish international networks within the discipline.

• Structured online discussions to reflect on cultural and regional differences in values and assumptions affecting the discipline and how these might affect the actions of individuals.

• Group projects that require working online with peers from another cultural group(s) to compare and contrast perspectives on similar professional issues.

• Online group tasks that examine ways in which particular cultural interpretations of social, scientific, or technological applications of knowledge may include or exclude people from different cultural groups. Leask, 2004, p. 341

What are the challenges? High demands placed on teachers and students in successfully applying the model (Bower et al., 2014): • simultaneously teaching remote and face-to-face students

“forces” the teacher to split her attention, which may be problematic (Popov, 2009; Rogers, et al., 2003),

• attempting to simultaneously cater to face-to-face and remote students can lead to teachers compromising their pedagogical approaches (Popov, 2009),

• difficulty with promoting seamless interaction between remote and face-to-face students (Stewart, et al., 2011),

• the technology can also be an imposition for face-to-face students, for instance if they need to speak into a microphone (Rogers, et al., 2003).

Revisiting DigComp’s key areas, what are the benefits?

• Applying this model can help students to reach outside the sometimes narrow focus of the classroom and make the academic engagement relevant to life in a broader sense.

• Such activities demand a sustained sense of shared responsibility for co-construction and social presence through which faculty and students identify with the community, engage in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2010).

• By learning together in such a community, students experience shifting roles and redefined positions as well as a dynamic distribution and changing levels of expertise, which characterise collaborative learning (Strijbos & Weinberger, 2010).

• These processes also provide students with hands-on experience with telecollaborative practices, which generate skills transferable to other academic or professional contexts.

Thank you!

dornerh@ceu.edu