Designing for Engagement: Integrating Digital Media Projects into Online Asynchronous Courses
Concurrent Session 3
Brief Abstract
Our goal is to highlight digital media project designs that bridge gaps between digital media consumption and creation in asynchronous online learning. We will share digital media projects that prioritize diverse digital literacy skills, which are transferable and also motivate students in their personal, academic, and professional endeavors.
Extended Abstract
Introduction
This presentation aims to engage our audience in a discussion about strategies for designing engaging digital media projects for online courses. We will present key examples from courses focused on the sociology of genocides and an augmented reality (AR) project for a new media and digital art course. We will discuss how each of these project designs prioritizes digital literacy skills beyond academics to create a pathway for students to go from digital media consumer to creator and why that matters. We will also discuss how these project designs help nurture student engagement, motivation, and skill development in the long term. We contend that these designs empower students to engage more deeply, critically, and meaningfully within and outside a given subject area. We discuss the motivation for our designs and take a poll of attendees about if they are already working with digital media projects, their attitudes towards the adoption of digital media tools, and their perceived barriers to entry. We will engage with the audience poll responses to discuss the alignment between course design, faculty goals, and our digital media project examples. We hope to create a conversation around each example we present. We will then discuss how each digital media project was structured and share faculty feedback to gain insight into what worked well, what didn’t, and what we will do differently next time.
Motivation
First, we will consider the quintessential instructional design example of a discussion board. This activity typically utilizes homogenous modes of learner interaction whereby students read, research, and respond to a prompt and perhaps conduct a nominal amount of peer reviews. It is not uncommon for those peer reviews to be superficial given the mode of interaction [1]. As discussed by Carr, text-based Asynchronous Online Discussion Boards or AODBs tend to yield “disengagement as evidenced by robotic, forced, unnatural, shallow, disingenuous responses” [1] that fail to leverage other important nonverbal cues. However, this is often an insufficient motivation for faculty to further develop their course materials. For some instructors, updating online asynchronous course designs seems unnecessary, particularly if there’s not a great deal of change in their field that would impact their instructional material. Or, the technical barrier to entry to utilize emerging digital tooling seems too high with not enough payoff.
In response, we will share several digital media project designs that illustrate how and why faculty can be compelled to extend their existing learning activities and course projects using modern digital media tools to foster a more diverse learning experience and new skills and competencies for their students. We will also discuss how these richer learning experiences are directly transferable in adjacent fields of study. Our examples leverage faculty expertise and accessible tools that accommodate existing and developing learner interests, and skills and serve multiple perceptual learning styles. Lastly, these assignment designs prioritize continuity and alignment in the overarching course design and incorporate broad parameters for student success by affording some degree of learner autonomy.
Example 1: Augmenting our environments to tell a story or send a message.
We can learn a lot from the field of New Media Digital Art. Digital media asset generation is typically framed beyond mere utility through a higher-level concept, story, or narrative. New media artists often use higher-level concepts from adjacent fields as a basis for artworks as a way to explore complex ideas and challenge conventions in civil society. These concepts typically include a wide range of topics, such as cultural identity, social justice, ecology, technology, and posthumanism, among others.
Our first project example is from a New Media Digital Art foundational asynchronous course. Students created original digital media assets across a multi-week format, which then formed the basis of a substantive augmented reality (AR) course project. In general terms, learners acquired computational thinking skills, digital media curation experience for communication and public consumption, project management experience, and broad product design and product development skills. Course modules typically include smaller projects that explore the societal and political roles of visual arts concepts in civil society, such as the role of color, shape, and smoothness and how those ideas related to civil rights, cultural appropriation, and online identity. These are great ways to frame digital projects so that learners can draw clear connections between their more abstract digital artworks and how they relate to their physical environments. Those connections can be further developed using augmented reality tools. Virtual and personal learning environments have been shown in numerous studies to increase permanence in learning and creativity [2, 3]. Ultimately, it was a fairly intuitive decision to include augmented reality software applications as a way to make these digital creations manifest in a learner’s immediate physical environment because technologies afford the mapping or blending of digital assets into a physical space that students can interact with more directly using auditory and visual modes.
These blended modes of learning also permeated the design of the accompanying instructional materials. Rather than stepping through a video or textual tutorial, the tool itself was used to create an interactive, hands-on instructional experience for students to learn how they could integrate their assets in addition to highlighting important perceptual considerations when arranging their materials. For example, assignment requirements were supported by learning materials that used AR to demonstrate how audio could be used to indicate the physical location of visual assets. This allowed students to get a sense of how they could reify digitally abstract ideas by combining auditory and visual cues into a single user experience. In sum, the students gained a broad range of multimodal skills mappable across different subject areas and professional industries and generated original portfolio content cultivated through more immediate, real-time peer review.
Example 2: Communicating testimonials through maps, data, and storytelling.
As instructional designers, our opportunity to glean this information is generally during an early-planning phase in our design process, when we engage directly with our clients or SMEs about their teaching styles and the direct student feedback they have received on their adopted teaching styles and learning materials. In this next example, the faculty member wanted to engage students in research and storytelling outside of a traditional essay assignment for a course in the sociology of genocides. One of the course objectives is to, “Develop better understandings of certain genocides, their historical roots and continued importance today.” To help meet this objective, the ID and faculty member designed a project that required the use of qualitative and visual data to create narratives of genocide that are powerful tools for memorialization and cultural analysis. Rather than simply examining a dataset and drawing a conclusion, this project leverages the power of storytelling and developing a narrative to help communicate an idea in a more impactful way. ArcGIS Storymaps was chosen for its ease of use and purpose of telling place-based stories. Storymaps has a low floor and high ceiling. Students can easily learn to use the tool and create a wide range of projects that could vary in complexity.
In completing this assignment, students reviewed survivor testimonies and related those to cultural studies and theories learned in class, engaging deeply in sociological research that they would have otherwise used in a typical research essay. They also acquired new skills that could be mapped to adjacent fields, increased confidence, fostered a growth mindset, and generally bolstered the students’ motivation to do their best work.
Conclusion
It is important to us to demonstrate that digital media projects can be effectively designed and used across disparate disciplines and subjects. As we have shown, students enthusiastically engaged with coursework when presented with novel assignments, not just another research essay or project. Students were able to learn new skills and tools that prepared them for further academic, personal, and professional pursuits with more enthusiasm, leading to better engagement with instructional materials and an increase in learner motivation.
Choosing tools that are accessible on multiple levels is critical. Instructors and designers need to be prepared to provide students with scaffolding and tutorials and to direct them to additional instructional support when it is needed. It is, however, not just in the tools you choose. We also hope to have shown you that deploying these tools strategically (promoting continuity and alignment in the course) is just as important. Developing digital media projects can seem daunting at first, but with the right scaffolding and setting expectations for faculty and students, you can create an engaging digital media project with a low barrier to entry. We hope we have shown you the value of designing a digital media project.