Practical Examples of Digital Learning Citizenship in the College Classroom

Digital learning can be a tool for more than teaching content and managing grades. It can also be a tool for helping students progress toward becoming responsible, engaged citizens by promoting reflection, learning, and collaboration.

Practical ways to use digital learning to encourage responsible citizenship was one of the highlights of Beyond Content: Teaching for a Better World, a June 24 webinar featuring Bryan Dewsbury, Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University, and Dharma Dailey, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Washington.

With moderator Christine Latulippe, Visiting Associate Professor at Linfield University and community manager of Transform Learning, the presenters discussed designing digital learning environments that both nurture technical expertise and prepare students to be thoughtful, engaged citizens.

Latulippe began by situating the theme of the webinar in the framework of digitally enabled evidence-based teaching practices. For example, active learning and instructional transparency — helping students see the “why” behind an assignment — are necessary preconditions to engagement. See the Transform Learning resource hub for more detail on those practices.

First the person, then the protocol

Dewsbury explained how he begins every semester by getting a fix on individual students as people, not data points. He uses a simple Google Form tool to survey students about their digital learning resources such as wi-fi, their career aspirations, and even “one thing a professor does that you don’t like.”

Next he presents for discussion and revision a set of “guideposts” for productive dialogue. It includes principles like:

• Turn to wonder
• Respect silence when topics get difficult
• Listen as hard as you talk

The goal of this exercise is to rehearse the rules of civil discourse that will make group work and class discussions more productive, and that students will need beyond campus.

Also early in the semester, Dewsbury assigns students a short “This I Believe” essay modeled on the popular National Public Radio series. The assignment signals that personal values are welcome inside technical spaces.

“I can’t tell you, my friends, how beautiful this is,” he said. “This really is my favorite assignment. I’m asking them about their ‘why.’ I’m communicating to them, ‘I am interested in you as a person.’”

Dewsbury keeps promoting engagement and citizenship in mind when designing evaluation and assessment. For example, he requires students to self-assess their participation using a rubric, but the point deductions are minimal.

“I need to set the tone from day one that you are not in The Hunger Games,” he explained. “I’m not a barrier for you to solve. I’m going to do all I can to ensure you get to a place where you can see how powerful your potential is. That means sometimes you may have to stumble a bit on a few quizzes or an exam before you see what it takes to really know something.”

Design thinking as civic thinking

Dailey’s presentation drew from her experience mentoring other faculty and researchers on using human-centered design for pro-social outcomes. “Human- centered design is work that starts everywhere, and it’s work anyone can do,” she emphasized.

A favorite exercise she gives to colleagues is a five‑day diary study of “UX dark patterns.” They document every manipulative popup or infinite‑scroll trap they meet online, then crunch the dataset together, considering questions about persuasion ethics.

Dailey also shared several tools she uses with those colleagues, such as a stakeholder analysis canvas, which asks them to name every group touched by a design — users, regulators, bystanders — and to identify who has a voice and who does not.

Another common framework in human-centered design is the “double diamond.”

“Notice how discovering the problem and defining the problem take as much space in this diagram as developing solutions and delivering solutions,” Dailey said.

“That is a very different mental model than many students and in fact many engineers that I’ve worked with have of how the work is actually broken down. But it’s really essential, if we’re going to make systems accountable, that we’re making time to integrate people into that process.”

Examining design can slow down processes and reveal uncomfortable ambiguity, but “when we are truly, authentically committing to integrating multiple perspectives into the design, then the cadence of the work is going to look different,” Dailey said.

Planning for engagement

One of the key ideas from the presenters was that engagement won’t happen simply by instructors encouraging it in the abstract. “Just because we have a diverse classroom, and just because I want them to have meaningful dialogue and I put them in groups, doesn’t mean that will happen,” Dewsbury said.

“We have to remember that our students are not going to walk up to us and say, ‘Professor, I don’t feel a sense of belonging.’ They’re not going to say ‘I feel stereotype threat descending and thus I would ask for you to review your practices in order to mitigate that.’ The challenge and the beauty of teaching is to be able to read the subtitles — to be able to see the nonverbal behavior, to hear the words that they articulate, and understand the real meaning beneath it.”