Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

9.2. Learning Goals for a Digital Age

I listed a number of skills that learners will need in a digital age, including:

• Modern communication skills
• Independent learning
• Ethics and responsibility
• Teamwork and flexibility
• Thinking skills including:
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Creative thinking
• Strategizing and planning
• Digital skills
• Knowledge management

These are examples of the kinds of goal that need to be identified. More traditional goals might also be included, such as comprehension and application of specific areas of content. These goals or outcomes might be expressed in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) or the Royal Bank of Canada’s (2018) or in a variety of other ways. All these skills need to be embedded or built within the needs of a specific subject domain. In other words, they are skills that need to be specific to a subject area rather than general. At the same time, students who develop such skills within any particular subject area will be better prepared for a digital age.

Your list of goals for a course may – indeed, should be – different from mine, but it will be essential to do the kind of analysis recommended in Step 1 (deciding how you want to teach), and then to decide on what the learning goals should be, based on:

• Your understanding of the needs of the student
• The needs of the subject domain
• The demands of the external world

I have placed a particular emphasis on the development of intellectual skills. As with all learning goals, the teaching needs to be designed in such a way that students have opportunities to learn and practice such skills, and in particular, such skills need to be evaluated as part of the formal assessment process. Perhaps more challenging is to identify what you will be adding to general skills development such as critical thinking. What is the level of critical thinking skills that students will come with, and how do I make sure they progress in their ability in this skill during the course? This emphasises the value of having learning outcomes clearly identified for a whole program, perhaps using a curriculum mapping tool such as Daedalus.

What this means in terms of course design is using the Internet increasingly as a major resource for learning, giving students more responsibility for finding and evaluating information themselves, and instructors providing criteria and guidelines for finding, evaluating, analysing and applying information within a specific knowledge domain. This will require a critical approach to online searches, online data, news or knowledge generation in specific knowledge domains – in other words the development of critical thinking about the Internet and modern media – both their potential and limitations within a specific subject domain.