Designing a Pathway to Digital Fluency

This chapter addresses the need for developing digital fluency skills in higher-education students in order to best prepare them for real-world success. The pathway to digital fluency is complex and requires a reimagined, collaborative approach to learning design. This chapter considers the elements of authentic learning as a means of developing students' digital fluency and proposes learning design as a pathway to action for teacher-developed authentic learning activities. The chapter begins by exploring the concept of digital fluency in order to develop a definition that informs pedagogical approach. Approaches to digital fluency development are examined through digital literacy and authentic learning frameworks. The pedagogical approach is further examined and conceptualized through the process of learning design. Considerations are presented at the end of each section to illustrate relationships between digital fluency, authentic learning, and learning design, and to allow for further exploration of concepts within unique contexts.

From pandemic to endemic: Examining transitions in blended learning in teacher education

One year ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic. Twelve months on, we reflect on the educational change in Singapore and embrace the need to constantly re-imagine blended learning for living and learning with COVID-19. Using Dr Roger Greenaway’s four F's of active reviewing - Facts, Feelings, Findings & Future as the structure, this paper first presents the study of the transitions in blended learning of higher education pre-, during and post-pandemic lockdown. This review placed a spotlight on many gaps. Hence, this paper discusses pertinent issues following the review, particularly COVID-19 accelerated remote teaching, the ‘Blended Learning@NIE’ policy, and the policy-making process. This paper also reports the preliminary result of the policy implementation through the end-of-semester evaluation. The result is congruent with the feelings to develop digital fluency as teacher intuition for designing, developing and facilitating more meaningful blended learning experiences.

New Features of Learners in Education

Throughout the recent decades there have been rapid developments and changes in terms of science and technology. From now on, individuals want a flexible education format in which time and place are changeable in line with their desires and concerns. Particularly from the perspective of lifelong learning, digitalization can be seen as an important element which forces individuals to change. Some of these are digital awareness, digital competence, and digital fluency. As one of the digital terms, digital competence includes the effective, efficient, critical, flexible, and reflective structuring of information for business, learning, and socializing, while the latter digital fluency is the ability to know when and where to use technology. The main problem that stands out is adapting education programs according to the new developments. The restructuring of the program development activities, so as to raise individuals with changing and developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes, acts like a spotlight which highlights the critical role of program development in the education system.

The Importance of Digital Fluency in Terms of Disruptive and Emerging Technologies

This chapter primarily provides information about digital literacy, which enables us to make basic use of today's technologies. In parallel with today's technological developments, high-level digital literacy skills expected from individuals are addressed. Definitions of digital fluency and studies on this subject are examined. The concept of digital fluency is redefined by the authors. It is based on theoretical foundations that are needed by authors on why digital fluency is needed in educational life. The authors point to the lack of a workforce with high-level digital literacy capabilities around the world.

Digital Fluency in SMEs

In the practitioner and the academic literatures, links between information technology (IT) adoption, IT use, and digital fluency (DF) have been emphasized by a number of authors. However, there is a lack of understanding of what exactly digital fluency is, how it can be conceptualized, and what role it plays in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on the DF literature and its underlying concepts such as skills, expertise, and competencies, as well as on the SME literature, a multi-case study of three Canadian SMEs is conducted to empirically evaluate a typology of DF archetypes. The typology, that is based on a change agent perspective, has three archetypes. Results suggest that SMEs' managers should focus on the complementarity nature of the cognitive, social, and technological dimensions of DF when assessing and developing their employees' DF.

Digital Fluency and the Construction of Pedagogical Strategies for Distance Learning

The objective of the study is to identify Pedagogical Strategies (PS) that can contribute to the construction of Digital Fluency in the Distance Learning (DL) context. Technological changes in society include their own set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes called Digital Competences (DC). Specifically, in distance learning, digital fluency is considered paramount since it is related to the use of technologies where the subject feels digitally active, especially with regard to the production of content/materials for the virtual environment. This can be divided into five specific competences: Content Production, Data Protection, Networking, Virtual Resilience, and Teamwork. Thus, PS were created from the analysis of competences in order to assist the instructors to build them with their students in the DL environment. This study used a qualitative methodology based on an interpretative approach. The instrument used for data collection was an online questionnaire evaluating the Pedagogical Strategies for the Digital Fluency Competence. The target audience of the research was 90 specialists in the area of ​​distance learning who responded and suggested changes to the PS. The results enabled the development of a framework with 46 Pedagogical Strategies divided into the 5 specific competences of Digital Fluency to aid teachers in meeting students’ needs.

M-Learning: Focus on Digital Fluency

<span style="vertical-align: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">O presente artigo trata da criação de uma arquitetura pedagógica (PA) para auxiliar professores e alunos no desenvolvimento da fluência digital por meio da aprendizagem móvel. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Para isso, optamos por uma abordagem qualitativa de estudo de caso, em uma disciplina de educação a distância para estudantes de diferentes cursos de graduação de uma universidade do sul do Brasil. </span><span style="vertical-align: inherit;">Como ações finais, constatamos que a aplicação do AF criado pode auxiliar no planejamento e desenvolvimento de atividades que promovam a fluência digital por meio do m-learning, ampliando as possibilidades dos processos de ensino e aprendizagem dos alunos na modalidade a distância.</span></span>