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Selection of digital learning technologies.

 

1. Explore and Reflect:

Identify Needs:

• Identify the specific needs and goals of your audience and your course. Reflect on what you aim to achieve with technology integration.
• Explore what digital tools and resources available. Consider their features, benefits, and limitations.
• Pedagogy standpoint: Ensure that the chosen technologies align with your teaching philosophy and pedagogical approaches.

2. Evaluate Tools:

• Usability: Assess the ease of use for both educators and students. Tools should be intuitive and user-friendly.
• Functionality: Ensure the tools offer the necessary features to support your course objectives. Look for tools that enhance learning experiences.
• Compatibility: Check if the tools are compatible with existing systems and platforms used by your institution.

3. Support Students:

• Help students navigate and utilize the technologies effectively.
• Develop support materials such as  video tutorials, and step-by-step guides.

4. Reduce Cognitive Load:

• Choose tools with clean, simple interfaces to minimize distractions and cognitive overload.
• Break down content into manageable chunks to help students process information more easily.
• Provide Clear Instructions: Ensure that instructions for using the tools are clear and concise.

5. Ongoing Support:

• Schedule regular check-ins to address any issues and gather feedback from students.
• Feedback Loops: Create channels for students to provide feedback on their experiences.
• Continuous Improvement: Use feedback to make necessary adjustments and improvements to the technology integration.

6. Ethical, Accessible, and Affordable:

• Ethical and Legal Considerations: Ensure that specific learning technologies respect student privacy and data security, facilitate accessible and equitable learning environments .
• Accessibility: Choose technologies that are accessible to all students, including those with disabilities. Ensure compliance with accessibility standards.
• Affordability: Consider the cost of the tools and strive to select options that are affordable for both the institution and students.

 

By following these key aspects, educators can effectively integrate technology into their courses, support students in using these tools, and create a positive and inclusive learning environment.

 

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Pedagogical Relevancy: Choose technology that aligns with educational goals and enhances the learning experience. Digital tools should support active learning by enabling collaboration, feedback exchange, and peer communication, and should foster student engagement. These tools must be adaptable to different teaching methods (e.g., lecture, presentation, collaborative group inquiry), alternative content delivery formats (e.g., in-person teaching, fully online, and blended instruction), and different learning needs and preferences (e.g., self-paced independent learning or instructor-facilitated learning).  

Ethical Considerations: Ensure that the technology complies with data protection regulations and respects users’ privacy. This includes addressing data privacy, AI bias, and transparency. For example, using a learning management system (LMS) that encrypts student data.

Accessibility Features (e.g. contrast requirements etc.): Select technologies that include support for screen readers, keyboard navigation, and provide captions and transcripts to ensure inclusivity for students with visual, motor, and hearing impairments.

Affordability and Cost-Effectiveness: Opt for Open Education Resources and consider the long-term costs for maintenance and support of the learning technologies and digital content.   Knowledge check on the selection criteria or some principles to follow for designing quality digital learning environments Readable fonts, high contrast colors ensuring the contrast between text and background, avoid overly decorating texts making the text legible descriptive texts: provide contexts for users with the screen readers Example : Adobe Express https://new.express.adobe.com/ offers a free plan that does not require a subscription. The free plan includes access to thousands of templates, Adobe Stock photos, videos, music, Adobe Fonts, design assets, and more. It also provides 5GB of storage and access to a collection of free Adobe Stock photos under a Standard License (License information and Terms of Use | Adobe Stock)

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use exersise to practice selecting contrasting colors for texts and backgrounds

Captions are essential to making video content inclusive. By adding captions, you’re not only helping viewers who might be hard of hearing but you’re also helping those who are in loud environments or watching without sound. Think of captions as the text version of your video’s audio track — they provide all the essential dialogue, sound effects, and even background sounds that may impact the viewer’s understanding. Make sure your captions are perfectly synced with the spoken words and relevant sounds so they enhance the viewing experience for everyone.

If you’re working in Adobe Express, you can easily add captions

to any video. uplload a video-free to use no credit card required   — Alt text provides a description of visual elements for users who rely on screen readers. When adding alt text, aim for a concise yet descriptive summary of the image’s content. For example, instead of “Image of a coffee grinder” you might use “Illustration of an old-fashioned coffee grinder” to provide more context.

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Logical Content Structure

A well-structured document helps users navigate your content efficiently. You can achieve this through the proper use of headings, lists, and other structural elements. Headings should be used in a logical hierarchy (e.g., Heading 1 for main sections and Heading 2 for subsections). This hierarchy helps screen reader users understand the organization of the content and navigate through it more easily.

Title

heading 1

heading 2

..

heading 4

Normal

Testing for Accessibility

Testing is a crucial step in ensuring that your design is accessible. Use accessibility checkers and tools to identify potential issues and verify that your content meets accessibility standards. Involve users with disabilities in the testing process to gather feedback and make necessary improvements.

——————– design Practice for using color contrast checkers (tools like Adobe-express offer contrast checker, color blindness simulator; other online open access tools) , assigning alt text options, captions, descriptions, references to the digital element Source.  

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have enough contrast to pass AA and AAA standards.

These two levels, set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG

), help gauge how accessible your design is for people with visual impairments. AA is the foundational standard, ensuring that your content is easy to read for those with moderate vision difficulties and accessible to people with color blindness and other disabilities. It means that key elements of your design — like text, images, and interactive features — meet these minimum accessibility standards.

AAA, on the other hand, raises the bar, indicating content that’s more accessible to individuals with severe visual impairments. Meeting AAA compliance involves higher contrast requirements, more detailed text alternatives, and stricter guidelines for various types of media. While this can make it trickier to work with color schemes, fonts, and complex visuals, it enhances inclusivity for everyone.

Achieving AAA compliance can be challenging in some cases, but aiming for AA standards provides a good balance between accessibility and creative flexibility.

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Multimedia Activity

Choosing and evaluating a technology to use in your classroom is a multidimensional decision that involves many perspectives beyond the technology’s ability to do what you need it to do. The SECTIONS model offers a helpful framework based on eight important factors to consider. To begin to familiarize yourself with the model, click on each of the hotspots on the image for a question to consider when choosing technology. We will apply this model later in this challenge. The image below is from the chapter on choosing and using media in Teaching in a Digital Age by Tony Bates.

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Learning Activities

1.   Learn it for yourself

When considering integrating technologies into your teaching practice, a great place to start is exploring what’s available at your institution for both you and your students. This way, you and the students can gain access to free and supported tools that take student privacy into account.

To help you discover and document the technologies and supports available at your institution, download and/or print this scavenger hunt activity. Browse your institution’s website or speak with staff in service areas (e.g., information technologies, teaching and learning centre directly to learn more about what’s available to help you fill it out. The more specific you can be, the more helpful this resource will be, as it will become a “cheat sheet” to refer back to when planning future lessons. We will also be referring back to it in future challenges.

If you are looking to explore other tools that aren’t available at your institution, browse the B.C. Digital Literacy repository’s Technology Supports page. You will be introduced to tools such as Hypothes.is, H5P, and SPLOT websites. Keep in mind that a good practice is to check with your institution before using new technologies to ensure student privacy and protection.

2.   Incorporate it into your teaching practice

Using the scavenger hunt that you completed earlier, or the B.C. Digital Literacy repository’s Technology Supports page, choose a technology you learned about in this challenge. Think about a problem or situation you’re experiencing in the classroom that you think one of the technologies can help you resolve (e.g., you want to incorporate more formative assessments into your lectures and you think Slido can help you achieve that).

Work through the following H5P activity, which includes a few streamlined questions based on the SECTIONS model above, to help you reflect on choosing suitable technologies to use in your classroom. It will help you see how technology supports, ethics, and accessibility are intertwined. Be sure to click the buttons next to the yes/no answers to learn more!

Please note that this is only a small sample of the kinds of questions to ask yourself when choosing a technology for your course. See Appendix 2 in the Further Reading section for additional questions.

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Sources for the SECTIONS quiz questions:

• SECTIONS UBC resource (PDF framework)

• H5P activity

• Using SECTIONS to Select Digital Tools

• Digital Literacy Framework

We hope this simplified technology assessment has prompted you to think beyond the simple utility of an educational technology. If you answered mainly yes, it likely means you’ve thought about technology integration from a variety of perspectives — great job! If you answered with a few no’s, hopefully you were able to provide thoughtful rationales for those responses or were prompted with additional perspectives to consider in your decision-making journey when selecting a technology.

Next, create a reflective post that captures your journey through this assessment. What had you already considered when choosing the technology? What did you learn about that you hadn’t initially considered? Was there anything about the assessment that surprised you? What is one thing you learned to apply in the future?

When you’ve chosen an appropriate technology for your classroom, it’s essential to provide students with the technical support they need to be successful. Avoid assuming that students already know how to use the technology or that they have the skills to learn it quickly. While students might be familiar with certain technologies, educational technology platforms may be brand new to them!

• In your course outline, describe the technologies used in your course and what support resources are available.

• In assessments that involve technology, include:
  • • A brief description of the technology, how it aligns with the learning outcomes, and the skills students will develop as a result of using the technology
  • • Technical instructions or guides that students can refer to when learning how to use the technology
  • • Support resources available to students (e.g., where can students go if they have questions or need assistance with troubleshooting the technology?)

• Talk to the teaching and learning centre or learning technology centre at your institution for guidance on aligning technology with course learning outcomes and teaching practices.

3.   Teach it to students

This Technology for Post-Secondary Readiness Lesson Plan will help you have a conversation with students about assessing their technology readiness skills and point them to self-directed learning opportunities.

Create a mini-survey at the beginning of the term to gather information about your students’ comfort level and familiarity with technologies you’re considering implementing in your course. This will help you ensure that the proper support is in place for students learning and using the technology.

Further Reading

• The Choosing and Using Media in Education: The SECTIONS Model chapter in Teaching in a Digital Age, by A.W. Bates, is an in-depth examination of the SECTIONS model.

• Or go straight to Appendix 2: Questions to Guide Media Selection and Use section for more in-depth questions aligned with the SECTIONS model to ask yourself.

• For a different option, explore the eLearning Toolkit Evaluation Rubric that Western University developed to guide the appraisal of technology tools.

 

Examples:

• • Browse a snapshot of the educational technology tools being used across the province in 2019: Educational Technology at Work in British Columbia: The ETUG Community Survey Results (blog post)

• • Explore this edtech demo to see how others have built on existing models to create a rubric to assess technologies for use in the classroom: More Tools Than Time: Sharing a Rubric for Aiding Instructors’ Predictive Evaluation of eLearning Tools (video, 50 minutes)