When incorporating digital pedagogy into the classroom, it is important to take several considerations into account.

‌• Ask the question, why digital? Before designing a digital pedagogy course component, consider why you are choosing digital and what it will achieve that other approaches will not. It’s possible that digital is not the best medium and that using it will make coursework more cumbersome than necessary.

• There is no such thing as a “digital native.” Some students are tech-savvy, especially if their major is technology-oriented. There are many other students, however, who are not inherently good at or comfortable with using technology in course work, despite being proficient with certain technologies like social media. Therefore, do not make assumptions about their technical abilities.

• Make sure there is enough room in the syllabus for students to execute assignments fully. Students need time to learn the technology, which means they need time to experiment, fail, and then succeed. Also, keep in mind that the primary learning curve might not be learning the technology itself as much as it is learning how to apply the technology to the specific assignment.

‌• Not all students have equal access to technology. Even if every student has a laptop, smartphone, etc., this does not mean their computer is fast enough or current enough, or they have the necessary bandwidth or data plan to meet the requirements of an assignment. Similarly, even if the necessary technology is readily available on campus, this does not mean every student can be on campus for the time it takes to complete an assignment. (Think about students who live off-campus or who work full-time.) For this reason, instructors should be prepared to meet the needs of students with less access, e.g., know where students can borrow equipment and give extra time to complete an assignment. One way to level the technology “playing field” is to allow class time for such work.

Conducting a class survey asking about student access to technology is one way to identify access issues. Ensure students’ responses are kept private.

• Be prepared to adjust an assignment for students with disabilities. If a student has a disability, it might be necessary to provide them with an alternative version of an assignment. For example, give a visually impaired student a podcast assignment in place of a video one. Additional support might be needed to help disabled students navigate the technology. Talk to a Digital Scholarship librarian or the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning for guidance on this matter and inquire with Disability Support Services about any assistance they can provide.

• Take privacy and online safety into account‌ when having students work publicly. When students are working online, be it a project they are creating, e.g., a website, or engaging with an online community, e.g., TikTok, discuss issues of privacy and safety. Allow students not to put their name on their work or put only their first name and last initial. When doing social media-based assignments, it might be best if they don’t use their personal accounts.

In addition to introducing digital pedagogy as a concept, this section provides guidance on how to implement digital pedagogy practices. The Digital Scholarship Group facilitates digital pedagogy in the classroom. For assistance or questions, contact Melanie Hubbard.

• Also, see Introduction to Digital Pedagogy, for videos and interactive content.

Contents

• What is Digital Pedagogy?

• Considerations

• Recommendations

• Assignment Design

  • Learning Outcomes

  • Mode/Method/Tool Process

  • Assignment Examples

• Evaluation

  • Assignment Criteria

• Maintenance & Archiving

  • Recommended File Formats

There are numerous digital pedagogy assignment examples out there. You can find many at the University of Michigan’s Digital Pedagogy Repository and the #DLFteach Toolkit. The BC Digital History libguide can also help faculty from multiple disciplines imagine possibilities. A few examples by the creator of this digital pedagogy guide include:

Mapping Parable of the Sower (Basic mapping)

• See assignment

• See associated visual image exercise

The Watts Collection (Digital collection creation)

• See syllabus and assignments

Evolution of International Policy and Policy Areas (Timeline)

• See assignment

Introduction to Voyant (Text analysis)

• See assignment

Archives, Race, and Justice (Digital storytelling)

• See project instructions

The following recommendations are intended to help reduce the challenges that can arise when leading a class through digital pedagogy assignments.

• Learn the technology, at least a little. If a librarian or instructional technologist is supporting the technology components of an assignment or activity, it is still a good idea for instructors to learn the technology, even if it is to gain only a basic understanding. Knowing something about the technology will enable instructors to have more in-depth conversations with students about the assignment or activity, maximize learning outcomes, and better understand students’ experiences.

• Scaffold larger projects. Scaffolding larger projects into smaller assignments can help students stay more organized, better manage their time, and develop their skills systematically.

• Strive to make digital projects ADA compliant. If a digital project (e.g., a website) is going to be public, try to make it as ADA compliant as possible. Compliance means doing things like making sure that web pages have headers and images have labels. Being conscientious about ADA standards will make the project accessible to a broader audience and will make students more aware of and sensitive to such needs. (See Accessibility Basics and W3C Accessibility Guidelines.)

‌• Have conversations about copyright and fair use before students begin incorporating media into their work. Even though the fair use doctrine enables students to incorporate media into projects with less concern about copyright, they should understand why they can more “freely” use media for a class assignment and not for other venues. (See more on intellectual property rights.)

• Include a disclaimer statement on public student projects that explains they are student work. A disclaimer will help prevent less information literate people from seeing such projects as an authoritative source. Additionally, it will signal to educators that the projects are potential teaching models. To that end, it is also helpful to include the assignment(s) that led to the projects' creation.

• Have at least a basic plan (or better yet a detailed one) for how you will evaluate student work. You and the students should have a clear idea of what the expectations are for the assignment(s). Waiting until the work is completed before determining how to evaluate it can make grading difficult and can leave students feeling unsure about the quality of their work and the fairness of the grading (see "Evaluation").

• Decide whether you want to maintain or archive student work. Digital technology is inherently impermanent (e.g., links break, and file types become obsolete). For this reason, it is important to decide whether you want to maintain or archive student work. (See the “Maintenance and Archiving” for more information.)

Digital pedagogy assignments can be stand-alone components of a course or be complementary or supplementary to more traditional coursework.

Assignments may be digital in origin or begin as a traditional assignment such as a paper and then be moved into a digital format. In the case of the latter, students are given the opportunity to learn about translation, be it the act of translating a paper into a digital project and/or translating academic writing and content for the general public.

The two sections "Learning Outcomes" and "Mode/Method/Tool Process" will assist with assignment design. The second section is especially useful if you do not know the method(s) and tool(s) you want to use.

Like with all assignment design, designing a digital pedagogy-based assignment should be driven by the learning outcomes. If you have already decided on the method (e.g., mapping) and tool (e.g., ArcGIS), designing or refining your assignment might be mainly a matter of selecting the desired learning outcomes and developing them further.

Related digital pedagogy learning outcomes include, but are not limited to, the ability to:

• Use digital tools to investigate scholarly questions

• Digitally present critical and creative scholarship

• Effectively organize information

• Navigate multiple literacies, e.g., information literacy, digital literacy, data literacy, and visual literacy

• Work collaboratively

• Manage projects

• Write for the web and/or public audiences

• Visually communicate

• Navigate intellectual property rights

• Comply with web accessibility standards

Guiding questions like these will help you identify learning outcomes:

• What literacies might students improve on or gain from this assignment?

• What communication, information organization, analytical, technical, and problem-solving skills does this assignment require?

• What will the assignment teach students about incorporating media (e.g., video and images) into their work?

• What will the assignment teach students about intellectual property rights?

• How will this assignment teach students to work in groups and manage projects?

After having identified learning outcomes, you can enhance them by creating more specific requirements. You can, for example, enhance an assignment's data literacy component by not just having students use datasets they can find but also having them create their own. This act of creation will give them a much deeper understanding of how datasets work. Another example would be having students create metadata for objects they incorporate into a digital exhibit. Creating metadata on top of writing captions will get students more engaged with the objects as it will require them to analyze them on multiple levels. An alternative to increasing specific and practical requirements is having students critically reflect on their work in the form of an essay, presentation, or by including a praxis component to their digital project that explains how they approached and accomplished their work (see praxis example).

The following information is intended to assist instructors who want to maintain or archive student work.

Due to constant changes in technology, digital projects, whether they are online or stored in a digital file format, are subject to loss and obsolescence. There are steps you can take to help maintain them, meaning keeping a project live and fully functional, and there are steps that can be taken to archive them, meaning capturing a version of a project that preserves the information but not necessarily its interactive component. Taking the following steps will help with project maintenance:

• To reduce obsolescence, save projects and media incorporated into projects using file formats that are open, non-proprietary, and widely available. (See "Recommended File Formats")

• When it is not possible to export a file, take a screenshot, e.g., if a cloud-based data visualization tool will not allow you to download the visualization as an image file, take a screenshot of it instead.

• If the project is online, periodically view it to make sure it is still viewable and that nothing needs to be updated, e.g., if it is Wordpress, the platform version or a plugin might need to be updated by simply clicking “update.”

• To prevent media loss, upload media so that it “lives” in a project or in a permanent repository linked to the project.

• When linking to media, choose media from more reliable repositories like the Internet Archive and Wikicommons as opposed to YouTube or an image found on a random webpage.

• To reduce “link rot” or “dead links, link to source less likely to be taken down or moved, e.g., sources in the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and museum digital collections. Also, periodically check for dead links using a free link checker tool (Search “link checker” in a web browser, and multiple tool options will come up.)

For more information, talk to the BCDS Group, which can help you create a maintenance or preservation plan.

Below is a list of possible assignment criteria to incorperate into requirements and/or rubrics.

‌External Links

• External sites linked to are selected based on how much they add to the content of the project.

• The external sites are carefully selected based on the quality of information they provide

‌Media

• All media, e.g., images and video, are relevant to the topic.

• All media is chosen based on the intellectual value or meaning they bring to the project.

• There are captions or text that explain the relevance of the media.

• All media is properly cited, and/or credit is given.

Organization

• The information architecture is logical and easy to navigate.

• The menu/navigation bar labels are logical, concise, and relevant to the information they link to.

• Page headers and subheaders are logical, concise, and relevant.

• The layout of the content on individual pages is well organized and logical.

Technical Basics

• All hyperlinks work and link to the appropriate site/page.

• All images appear.

• All URLs (web addresses) have been turned into hyperlinked text. The specific words chosen to be hyperlinked should be logical, i.e., they lead to where users would expect.

Usability

• The project addresses basic ADA compliance requirements, including:

  • Headers are consistently used.

  • Images have alt-text.

  • Fonts and color choices are ADA approved.

Visual Design

• There is an appropriate (aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating) balance between text and images.

• Text and images complement each other.

• Images are tastefully formatted, i.e., they are an appropriate dimension, cropped, so that rough edges are removed, they align well with the text, and they are of an appropriate resolution so that they do not look pixelated (more info on image size).

• All text is easy to read, be it due to layout (e.g., spacing) or the choice of size, font, and color.

Written Content

• The written content is concise while being highly informative.

• The written content is a synthesis and analysis of authoritative information/data and one’s own thoughts.

• Written content is logically organized and distributed throughout the site.

• Titles, headers, and captions are relevant, clear, descriptive, and thoughtful.

• As with an essay or long paper, there is a clear flow of ideas.

• Quotes and paraphrased ideas are properly cited.

The mode/method/tool process will help you identify the method(s) you want to use, get you thinking about possible additional learning outcomes, and point you in the right direction regarding tools. (Also, see "Tool" for a list of possibilities.)

The Process

The mode/method/tool process walks you through a series of questions and considerations to help you narrow down the options and identify additional learning outcomes.

Mode in this context means the way in which students engage with course materials, experience them, or express ideas about them. Examples of modes include spatial, temporal, textual, hypertextual, immersive, graphical, and exhibitive. ‌The choice of mode should be rooted in the type of thinking and reasoning you want students to do. For example, a map is a spatial mode. Creating one compels students to think and process information spatially.

Method is the way in which students are doing the work, meaning conducting research or presenting scholarship. Examples of methods include text analysis, GIS, and augmented reality. Modes that correlate with these methods include textual, spatial, and immersive, respectively.

Tools are the technologies that enable the execution of a method and the creation or presentation of content. Tools mean anything from a digital platform like Tableau and ArcGIS to a markup language like HTML and coding language like Python. The tool selection process should take into account key factors like complexity, accessibility, and support availability.

Guiding Questions

Answer these questions to begin the decision-making process.

1.) Mode

To select the mode(s), begin by asking the questions:

• How do you want students to experience the content associated with the assignment?

  (e.g., Do you want them experiencing it spatially or temporally or both?)

• Relatedly, what kind of thinking and reasoning do you want them to do?

To get you thinking more about potential learning outcomes ask:

• What impact will the mode(s) have on their learning?

‌2.) Method

To select the method(s), begin by asking the questions:

• In what way should students engage with the assignment subject matter that will align with the determined mode? (The Mode/Method/Tool Combinations list below will help with this question.)

To get you thinking more about potential learning outcomes ask:

• What impact will the method(s) have on their learning?

‌3.) Tool

To select the tools(s), begin by asking the questions:

• What tool(s) facilitate the methodological approach?

• What level of learning curve should the tool(s) have?

• Who will be teaching and supporting the tool(s)?

• Are the tool(s) accessible for students with disabilities? If not, what alternative tool(s) can be used, and what additional help might the student need to use them?

To get you thinking more about potential learning outcomes ask:

• How might the tool(s) create opportunities for additional learning outcomes?

• What technical and scholarly skills will students gain from using the tool?

Mode/Method/Tool Combinations

The following are only some of the possible combinations:

Scenarios

The following scenarios are intended to demonstrate ways in which the process might work.

‌Scenario One

Mode: An instructor of a lower division history class wants students to understand and “experience” how the Himalayan mountain range impacted the relationship between ancient India and China. The instructor's main objective is to help students understand the affect of typology and distance, so it is decided that spatial is the best mode.

Method: For the methods, they choose GIS and mapping, because both methods will allow students to deeply engage with the geography of the region and will, through the use of such features as topographical layers, help them better understand the complexity of landforms.

‌Tool: For tool, the instructor chooses ArcGIS Online because it allows students to add marks (e.g., pins) and data layers as well as provides topographic base layers. The online version (as opposed to ArcGIS Pro) was chosen because it is supported on campus, it has less of a learning curve, and it is cloud-based and, therefore, accessible from any computer.

Learning outcomes: In addition to original learning outcomes the instructor identified such as students will understand how the typology of the Himalayan mountains affected encounters between ancient India and China, they identify other learning outcomes such as students will learn to find, evaluate and incorporate spatial data into their scholarship.

Scenario Two

‌Mode: An instructor of both a lower-division and upper-division political science class wants their students to see the evolution of political rhetoric in presidential inauguration speeches over time and, therefore, they decide that a temporal and textual mode are most appropriate.

Method: The methods they choose are timeline visualization and text analysis, which will enable students to see patterns and trends in the speeches as well as present those changes visually.

‌Tool: For the lower-division class, the instructor wants to keep the technology as simple as possible so that students can focus more on gaining foundational rhetorical analysis skills. In response, the instructor chooses, TimelineJS, which requires only basic data entry skills, and Voyant, a free cloud-based text analysis tool with an easy-to-use graphic interface.

For the upper-division class, the instructor wants students to learn more complex text analysis skills. They stick with using TimelineJS because they know the text analysis component will be demanding. For the text analysis tool, they choose Python for “scraping” the speeches from the web and for running the anaysis. The instructor feels comfortable giving this assignment because all of the tools are free, work on both Mac and PC, is supported by the Library, and there are multiple online resources.

‌Learning outcomes: In addition to original learning outcomes the instructor identified like, students will be able to identify and analyze trends in inauguration speeches over time, the instructor identifies other learning outcomes such as students will learn the basics of cleaning and structuring data and, in the case of the upper-division assignment, gain a basic understanding of coding.

What is Digital Pedagogy?

Digital pedagogy is the deeply considered and conscious incorporation of digital tools, concepts, and methods into teaching and learning. The journal,, describes it as being “precisely not about using digital technologies for teaching and, rather, about approaching those tools from a critical pedagogical perspective.”

Digital pedagogy ranges in scope and complexity and can be about the incorporation of digitally-driven class assignments and projects (e.g., students creating a website or interactive online map.) Or, it can be about the creation of teaching materials (e.g., digital learning objects) and the use of digital tools in teaching. The critical components include the selection of the methods and tools used, how they are used, and issues around them (e.g., bias in algorithms).

Why Digital Pedagogy?

As a practice, digital pedagogy fosters multimodal teaching and learning and can provide new and creative ways into class subject matters. Some compelling reasons for the incorporation of digital pedagogy into courses include:

• Digital pedagogy assignments and activities have and prepare students to be critically engaged with technology postgraduation.

• Digital pedagogical approaches give less conventional learners alternative ways to demonstrate their knowledge and abilities otherwise difficult to show in more traditional coursework.

• Digital pedagogy approaches can be used to make online course content more engaging and interactive.

Grading digital assignments can be challenging and can feel subjective if you have not articulated your expectations from the start. The following points will help you begin creating an evaluation criterion:

• Decide what is more important, the process students go through when conducting the assignment, the final product they create, or both. Based on what you decide, determine the weight you will give to each area. For example, the process could be 60%, and the product could be 40%.

• When evaluating the process component, determine how you will observe and measure it. Having students journal or write a longer essay about the process is one way. Having them present on it is another. When you scaffold an assignment, it is easier to keep an eye on how well students are following instructions and the care they are giving to each step.

• When evaluating the final product(s), determine what specific elements you will be grading. For example, in addition to grading the content, you can grade the writing quality, how well media is incorporated the interpretation and incorporation of data information organization, and the visual design principles applied. (See the for possible grading elements.)

• If students are working in groups, determine whether everyone will get the same grade or whether they will be graded individually. When you choose to grade students as a group, decide ahead of time how you will manage situations where students do not contribute enough to the project.

The following file formats are recommended for maintaining and preserving digital content. They were taken from the Smithsonian’s