Insights on Digital Media and Higher Education

Graduation is upon us, and most students will soon be entering the workforce full time. For many of them, this will be the first time they’ve held a job—rather than an internship or part-time “side gig”—specific to their field of study and qualifications. As educators, it is important to prepare these students for the world they are about to enter, both in terms of job-specific knowledge and in terms of broader competencies essential to navigating the professional world. Of the latter, digital literacy is one of the most important—and perhaps even the most important—skill sets today’s teachers and educators can pass on to all of their students.

Summer break is almost upon us, but how can we encourage students to continue using the skills, methodologies, and critical frameworks they have learned throughout the school year? Internships are a key solution to this question, in addition to being valuable assets to students’ professionalization and preparation for entering the workforce. 

Yet, not all internships are created equal. News media and educational magazines alike are rife with horror stories of unpaid internships that equate to little more than exploitation and glorified slave labor, all under the guise of gaining course credits and networking opportunities. This has never been more true than in the media, communications, and journalism fields—areas of specialty that often highlight the value of mentoring and apprenticeship.

How does the media we use in our daily lives translate to digital literacy in the classroom, and why is there such a disconnect between curricular and extracurricular technology use for both students and educators? These are the questions we found ourselves asking after examining the results of our State of Digital Media in Higher Education Report.

As a number of publications reported last month, including Education Dive, Inside Higher Ed, and Campus Technology, one of the most surprising takeaways from our survey findings was the discrepancy between students’ and educators’ estimation of their digital media know-how.

What interest could educators possibly have in the TED model for educational discourse? In recent months, we’ve written at length about the reasons students will underappreciate and undervalue their time in higher education, from vexation with the lack of technological resources on campus to a lack of faith in their instructors’ knowledge or passion. Regardless of the cause, the effect is that students are increasingly less engaged in their classrooms while many educators note that it is harder than ever to meaningfully connect with their pupils.

Last week we began our two-week feature on frustrations with digital media surfaced by our educational survey, the State of Digital Media in Higher Education Report. The report focused on gaining insight into how campuses are implementing digital technologies and what barriers, if any, prevented them from doing so. As we noted last week, our findings revealed two common trends and frustrations, voiced by both educators and students alike. The first was a common consensus among respondents that improving classroom technologies and resources were still too difficult to locate and use. This week we’ll be focusing on the second trend our survey highlighted: the problems many educators encounter when trying to successfully learn about and implement digital technologies in the classroom.

Last month we released our first State of Digital Media in Higher Education Report, which focused on gaining insight into how campuses are implementing digital technologies and what barriers, if any, prevented them from doing so. Our findings revealed two common trends and frustrations, noted by both educators and students alike, which we’ll be unpacking in a two-part series. In this first part of the series, we’ll examine the first frustration: Students, teachers, and staff all continue to be disappointed by the hurdles involved in locating and accessing digital resources.

VideoBlocks for Education is excited to announce the launch of U-Curate, a centralized content management platform that allows faculty, students, and campus media designs to discover and download both university-created footage and the $10M of royalty free digital media found in the Digital Backpack. Initially developed in concert with the University of Minnesota, VideoBlocks is now proud to offer its U-Curate platform to the entire educational community.  

In the past few months, we’ve written substantially on how schools and universities are incorporating new technologies into their curriculums and pedagogies, from increased use of digital resources to better engaging with students through digital storytelling. But what about the actual spaces—the classrooms, intensive workshops, and labs—that are helping students bridge the digital literacy gap and innovate for the future? We examine how multidisciplinary workspaces, including makerspaces, incubators, and innovation labs, are productively disrupting current educational frameworks and reshaping the face of higher education.

Open Educational Resources are often touted by educators and Open Resource advocates as the solution to the multimedia and digital literacy gap in the classroom. Yet, almost fifteen years after OER were first introduced, what they are and how schools and teachers can access them remains as hazy as ever. To help cut through the confusion, we’ve examined both the benefits and drawbacks of using OER, and we offer one solution to the challenges that they present.