Description
Digital fitness – or, more formally, digital literacy – refers to the capabilities that individuals need to live, learn and work in increasingly technology-rich environments.
When preparing or giving a course, university teachers obviously concentrate on disciplinary content. They know that students need preliminary knowledge as well as various general and digital skills – such as learning and organisation skills or information literacy – to understand, remember and apply the new content, but this is often not the teacher’s focus: consequently, digital literacy remains in many cases implicit or even unaddressed in university courses.
Nowadays this usual approach is starting to reach its limit. Due to the ever faster pace of the digital transformation and the increasing complexity of digital environments – with new tools, such as AI-based applications, emerging on a regular basis –, specific digital skills become obsolete more quickly. Both learners and teachers thus face new demands and must engage in a process of continuous learning. In such a situation, teachers preparing a course should ideally think not only about disciplinary knowledge, but also about how they can actively support students in developing their digital literacy, thereby contributing to enhance their “digital fitness”.
Course format
The course follows a flipped-classroom model. It consists of about 3 hours of asynchronous learning and a 2-hour in-class interactive session with discussion, Q&A and practical exercises.
To receive a certificate of attendance, participants have to:
- complete all tasks assigned for the asynchronous learning phase,
- take part in the on-campus synchronous session,
- submit a short course concept that shows either how they have integrated digital literacy development into their teaching in the past, or how they could do so in the future.