Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

9.3. Bring in the Outside World

One great characteristic of modern media is the opportunity to bring in the world to your teaching in many ways, for instance:

• By directing students to online sites, and encouraging them to identify and share relevant sites.
• Students themselves can collect data or provide real world examples of concepts or issues covered in the course, through the use of cameras in mobile phones, or audio interviews of local experts, or identifying relevant open educational resources.
• Setting up a course wiki that both you and the students contribute to, and make it open to other professors and students to contribute to, depending on the topic.
• If you are teaching professional masters or diploma programs, or MOOCs, the students themselves will have very relevant world experiences that can be drawn into the program. This is a great way to enable students to evaluate and apply knowledge within their subject domain.

There are many other possible goals that are either impossible to meet without using the Internet, or would be very difficult to do in a purely classroom environment. The art of the instructor is to decide which are relevant, and which in particular could be key learning goals for the course.