Exploring Teaching and Learning in an Undergraduate Online Digital Literacies Course: Instructor's Scaffolding, Students' Performance and Perspectives

Abstract

Literacy is evolving, dynamic, and intricately linked to social dynamics. It is crucial to consider how literacy shapes and is shaped by the current social context and educational settings. Over the past several decades, new technologies, such as the internet and digital tools have fundamentally transformed our literacy processes in terms of the ways we read, write, view, think, communicate, and collaborate. To foster comprehensive literacy in the 21st century, educational contexts should incorporate digital technologies to promote broader access to texts and information, facilitate creative self-expression among learners, and encourage collaboration widely. The research on understanding how technologies shape and transform literacy is limited. However, this qualitative and descriptive research, consisting of three articles, aims to explore and understand how undergraduate students are engaged in literacy learning activities in a remote learning environment. Three articles together illustrate the ways students participate in various literacy processes including online reading, evaluation of online information, digital project creation, and online collaboration. Situated in a fully online undergraduate-level digital literacy course, Article #1 takes a holistic view on the entire course, analyzing multiple scaffolding strategies by describing how they are implemented. It specifically explores the significance of human interaction, as a form of scaffolding strategy. By examining students’ perspectives, this study highlights the importance of considering how and when scaffolding can be optimally employed to support students. Article #2 investigates the processes of students’ evaluation of online information and illustrates how students create digital projects that link text knowledge, applied knowledge, and learning reflections together. Article #3 examines students’ learning performance and perspectives in completing a series of learning tasks. It shows different characteristics of students’ digital projects, reflecting their different ways of meaning making. This study contributes to digital literacies research to illustrate the multifaceted nature of teaching, learning, and students’ literacies processes in a remote learning environment. It sheds new light on how instructors’ well-designed learning tasks and learning support can assist students to engage in digital literacy processes of meaning making. Additionally, the results of this research will lead to a deeper understanding of learning task design, implementation, and learning assessment in an online learning context.