PG Certficate in education perspective #delila

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
Elizabeth Cleaver (University of Birmingham/ Newman College) and Claire Gordon (LSE) talked about OERs : A PGCert Perspective. After an introduction highlighting different approaches to developing skills within a course (identified as bolt-on or embedded), Gordon then went on to talk more about the LSE context: a postgraduate Certificate taken by about 100 Graduate Teaching Assistants a year, comprising of six modules. A decision had been taken to integrating educational technologies, and the initial approach was to add new sessions, but aiming for full integration in due course. Within this, academic and digital literacies are a small element. They are addressed particularly in the context of reflecting on student learning; discusing whether there is a "net generation", introducing models of information and digital literacies, and debating of how these literacies should be developed within courses.
Some challenges or lessons from this experience were:
- Importance of collaboration across departments;
- need for institutional (and departmental) buyin;
- constraints of the PG Certificate: since the digital and information literacy elements were quite small;
- also since the course was mostly taken by GTAs, they didn't have that much power over what happened in the curriculum.
Photo by Sheila Webber: conference freebies