Why it matters?
The curriculum allows instructors to transform traditional classrooms and create digital strategies, activities, and content for educational, cultural, social, and artistic experiences. In turn, these experiences are shaped for students to support their e-learning, develop skills, and gain knowledge.
Note. The digital curriculum is often flexible enough to personalize learning, suit learning needs, and provide opportunities. Yet, the alignment to the established education practices, standards, and rules is crucial.
What Are Common Digital Curriculum Resources?
As the digital curriculum aims to enhance the learning experience, the resources to provide a digital experience vary. Here are some of the most common digital curriculum resources:
- Classroom portals and learning spaces. With these resources, teachers provide learners access to learning materials, assignments, events, etc.
- E-books and digital textbooks. They help to offer classroom materials to the students in an interactive and accessible way. Examples of such resources are PDF e-books and providers like Amazon Kindle or Pearson.
- Digital lessons. They are the learning paths developed with certain tools and other resources.
- Pre-recorded and live sessions. This type can be used for instruction, knowledge sharing, real-time collaboration, and communication.
- Online communities or forums. They give opportunities for ideas-sharing and peer-to-peer learning.
- Multimedia content. Videos, infographics, websites, and embedded content are the digital resources that can be used in shaping the learning experience.
- E-learning apps and software. Lastly, numerous tools can be used to support studying, including activity-specific apps, like Mural (for visual collaboration), Kahoot (for quizzes), or PhET (for simulations), web-based platforms, course providers, and other courseware.
Note. The role of LMS in the provision of infrastructure is huge, as it offers a centralized system and features to manage classrooms.
Why is a Digital Curriculum Important?
The digital curriculum is important for schools, academies, and educational organizations as it helps to optimize learning strategies, provide innovative methods, and personalize learning provision.
What about young students? For instance, the K12 digital curriculum can offer opportunities and an environment for learning to study at their own pace, be flexible, and develop vital cognitive and technological skills that will be handy in real life.
What Are the Benefits of a Digital Curriculum?
By offering a new angle and opportunities to the providers of education, the digital curriculum brings numerous benefits to learners, educators, and organizations.
Let’s consider some advantages:
- Offers opportunities for personalized learning. With such digital resources as learning paths and portals, educators can customize learning for each student, give specific tasks, or provide room and freedom in task completion.
- Brings an interactive and engaging learning experience. Digital curriculum, concerned with different resources, allows offering diverse tasks and activities. It’s likely to result in engaging courses and programs.
- Enhances the accessibility of learning. The digital curriculum allows mixing instructional models and using flipped classrooms. It means that students can access assessments from home, be present in the classroom, or build skills with respect to their specific needs. In the end, it’s about a comprehensive approach.
- Fosters life and technical skills. Also, as digital curriculum puts learning in the digital realm, it prepares learners for the future world where technology plays a vital part in business operations and communication.
- Provides room for better tracking and management. If instructors or teachers use a learning management system, they may improve the learning progress tracking and process management thanks to in-built tools.
How Does a Digital Curriculum Support Personalized Learning?
Now, let’s see how digital curriculum can enhance personalized learning. First of all, it’s about answering students’ learning needs, preferences, and pace.
For instance, you can create unique learning paths for every learner or group of learners. It involves sharing classroom materials that answer their interests and preferences.
For one student or group of students, it will be a video followed by the task to reflect on the topic.
For another student, it will be doing research and writing an essay about it. In each case, you can use a learning portal developed for each student and offer different content.
Another way to bring more personalization is via personalized feedback. In particular, some LMSs offer peer-to-instructor reviews and comment sections with file uploads for each assignment. For instance, with such resources as Loom, instructors, or students can record videos with comments on tasks.
As a result, it helps to develop a unique approach for each student or group of learners. Concerning the latter, cohort-based learning resources can be a part of the digital curriculum.
How Does a Digital Curriculum Enhance Engagement?
As a digital curriculum offers a diversity of formats, it can significantly impact engagement. One can use videos, audio, and infographics that are better perceived by students.
If you are tech-savvy, you can integrate simulations, games, and even virtual spaces into your curriculum.
In particular, one can use Minecraft, a sandbox game, for the classroom, offering different scenarios and kits for the Digital Science Curriculum, or the ones related to math, history, or culture.
For instance, the digital citizenship curriculum high school teachers can resort to libraries of resources, like PBS Learning, use Minecraft Digital Citizenship kit, or bring Kahoot for presentations and quizzes. Peer-to-peer spaces are great for collaborative learning and the exchange of ideas.
Tip. The most engaging lessons are concerned with exploration and creation, as well as interaction.
How Does a Digital Curriculum Ensure Accessibility?
Digital curriculum allows learners to have better learning opportunities and educators have tools that will help them answer diverse learning needs. In this regard, teachers can resort to technologies and formats that are harder to implement in traditional learning environments.
What are common ways to use to ensure accessibility?
- Addition of alt texts to the pictures and captions or subtitles for the videos or presentation (for instance, Google Slides offers such a feature for presentations).
- Self-paced courses and programs where there is no pressure.
- Customizable learning paths for every student.
- Variety of formats to supplement or support content materials.
How Does a Digital Curriculum Develop Core Life Skills?
Incorporating resources, engaging with them, and fostering learning flexibility support the development of skills like responsibility, independence, creativity, and adaptability.
Other than that, digital curriculum significantly adds to the technological skills and media and digital literacy. How? By doing tasks online, teachers can prepare students to use and find the right online tools. Besides, they can better introduce the concepts of privacy and AI applications.
At the same time, if you develop your curriculum around forums, live sessions, and communities, you can help students improve their communication skills which are vital for business and everyday life.
How Can Schools Implement a Digital Curriculum?
The implementation of a digital curriculum isn’t t very different from the traditional one. However, you’ll need to consider that at least part of the learning will take place online. So, what are the crucial steps?
Step#1. Study learners, assess needs, and set goals
To effectively answer the learning needs of students, the digital curriculum should be based on research and understanding of the outcome of the learning.
From there, you will have enough insights to focus on activities and resources to shape experiences. For instance, you will need to understand:
- what materials to share;
- how to organize events;
- and which tasks to share.
With proper research, you will be able to connect student needs to learning outcomes, prepare students and staff, and build a technological infrastructure.
Step#2. Determine digital curriculum resources and develop a system
Next, schools, whether having a small or large number of students, will need to determine the system of infrastructure for learning provision. Based on learning needs, you should identify key digital curriculum resources to use.
Importantly, the first thing to consider is the set of resources for real-time collaboration and class management. Will you need Zoom and a simple learning space? Or an LMS, such as Moodle or Google Classroom, would be more appropriate?
Note. LMSs for higher ed centralize educational content, facilitate communication, track student progress, and offer various tools for personalized learning.
Step#3. Support teachers’ professional development
As technology develops, schools should offer training programs and training opportunities for instructors to use digital tools and software. There, schools ought to prepare workshops, online courses, and certifications for educators.
At the same time, they can hold digital labs and forums for the discussion of learning strategies and digital curriculum improvement. If the school uses a cloud LMS or third-party vendor, they can organize a call with support for a better understanding of the processes. Next, they will need time to test the app and create their first programs.
As a result, before implementing a digital curriculum, the school should make sure that teachers know how to use the product and be able to handle learning programs efficiently.
Step#4. Run a test and do an evaluation
Next, before carrying out a digital curriculum full-scale, you should do a test and apply a digital curriculum to several classes. It allows you to see the flaws, gather feedback, and adjust the program. Notably, ensuring regular evaluation and improvementwill make your curriculum more effective, relevant, and engaging.
What Are the Challenges of Implementing a Digital Curriculum?
Nevertheless, adopting a digital curriculum is far from easy. Why? Certain challenges may appear before administrators and teachers. Let’s cover some of them:
Funding. Incorporation of technological solutions can be expensive, especially for educational organizations without a significant inflow of funds. Yet, if we are talking about a web-based platform or small educational tools, there are a lot of budget options and free plans for such organizations.
IT and Technical Demands and Maintenance. The adoption of digital systems and software in an organization can put a certain load on the IT staff. Schools will need to update policies, provide access, improve network infrastructure, and implement security measures.
Granting access. Moreover, the digital curriculum will require not only enough resources from school to set up access but from students as well. It means that if learners don’t have digital devices, they may miss learning opportunities.
Lack of expertise or skills among teachers. Digital curriculum requires educators and instructors to understand how to manage web apps, and digital content and use various tools. In this regard, the lack of training may result in poorly implemented programs and drawbacks in learning provision.
Outdated policies. Any organization should consider the policies and strategies about Internet safety and copyright. For instance, adopting a digital citizenship curriculum in high school may require the update of policies and support of certain values and rules. Schools may need to teach how to use devices, what can be considered cheating, and how to follow cyber security guidelines.
Highlight: the main issues and challenges concerned with adoption of digital curriculum relate to lack of funding, resources, regulations, and training.
Conclusion
If you decide to adopt a digital curriculum, you should remember that it transforms traditional education and allows for providing flexible, personalized, and engaging learning experiences. For your organization, it may be a vital step forward, preparing students for a future where technology plays a central role in their personal and professional lives.
However, it’s not without its challenges. They refer to funding constraints, access issues, professional development for teachers, and network infrastructure. Thus, before implementation, you should think of your needs and goals, different tools and resources, and a well-developed learning system.
