Best Digital Learning Initiative (Instructional Design)

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Submitted by: Alfred Hermida

This digital learning initiative at the University of British Columbia adopted Web 2.0 tools to turn the traditional lecture into a participatory experience for students.
One of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel.
So for part of a new undergraduate foundation concentration in New Media and Society at the University of British Columbia, I used CoveritLive to create a real-time conversation online during a lecture.
We set up a class discussion page online using CoveritLive at http://www.journalism100.com/about/discussion/. The page was projected onto a screen in the lecture hall so that students could see the conversation unfold as the lecturer’s presentation was projected on a second screen.
As the lecture progressed, the students were able to discuss the content, submit comments and ask questions via CoveritLive -- these comments then appeared on screen.
The classroom experiment opened up the lesson in a unique way, providing a live insight into what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls mindcasting. Rosen used the term to describe how Twitter offers a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of people. In a sense, this is what our use of CoveritLive did, although in a much more limited way.
The lesson offered a new media twist on the notion of community-centered education, where students are expected to participate as they take responsibility for their own learning. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, the students had collaborated on distilling and creating the knowledge.