What do we mean by “digital teaching materials?”

It could be a wide-range of things, from online tools and technologies, to websites, open access journals – with the array of remarkable materials that you can find online, the list is endless. What is key is to imagine any traditional curriculum in a traditional face-to-face classroom setting that is now replaced with a digital version for the 21st-century classroom. Today’s 21st-century-learners typically have many daily digital practices and within the educational setting, benefit from consuming, reading, writing or creating using a wide range of multimedia texts, tools and technologies. While this resource focuses on the following mediums: video, audio and text in their digital forms, we recognize that there are many other digital learning materials available to teachers.

The use of digital materials in your teaching practice expands opportunities for engagement with your students.  Digital materials in various media formats offer benefits to student learning such as increased development of critical, higher-order thinking processes and skills. What’s more, deeper learning is more successful when content is presented in a variety of media formats.^[1]

Digital materials  also provide skill-building opportunities for students around collaboration, creation, and digital citizenship, thereby increasing their media literacy  – an essential competency for the 21st century learner. ^[2]  Educators need to be able to identify and use digital forms of copyrighted material in order to develop curriculum that feeds into media literacy development in their students. An added bonus is that students of instructors who incorporate and model good copyright practice, in turn develop their own fluency and consideration of copyright.

By utilizing digital media in a course, instructors now have more flexibility on how to show concrete examples of abstract concepts, which benefits student learning.^[3]  An example might be the use of an online video on centrifugal force in a physics class, versus reading a description of it. The video presents both visual and auditory cues in its representation of the concept.

Digital teaching materials also provide opportunities to provide current examples around content. Using contemporary media, such as videos, to illustrate recent and relevant developments within a subject matter, aid in connecting new knowledge to an existing knowledge base, as well as piquing interest in students. Think about how much more impact a ten-minute YouTube clip on the war in Syria would have on students might have over watching several slides within a classroom. Of course, there are many instances when a live, in-person discussion about it can be equally if not more effective, but the point is, there are lots of digital media available to help spur those discussions, and navigating around how to use them appropriately is a key part of unlocking this experience.