One of the easiest ways to bring digital literacy and digital creativity into the classroom is through course assignments. Not only do assignments allow us to work in grounded ways—as they often have clear outcomes and tangible materialities—but they allow most of us to work in familiar areas: designing assignments to help students engage course content, work through course concepts, and/or demonstrate their learning in meaningful ways. But even within that familiarity, we can often be at a loss for how to transform our existing assignments and practices to include a digital literacy or digital creativity component. This Spark page, then, is an attempt to provide some basic strategies for remaking our assignments in relation to the digital—with three basic orientations described here: Platform Swap, Open-ended Assignments, and Collective Projects.

• As a quick note, it is important for readers to keep in mind that this is not explicitly an assignment creation guide. Rather, what this offers is a set of maneuvers to help instructors engage digital literacy or digital creativity as part of a course's assignment work. For those looking for more technical guidance or genre-based considerations, I would point out that assignment designs look different across disciplines and have different conventions and expectations, so there is no single iteration that necessarily fits for all readers. But what I can provide, as at least one gesture toward these considerations, is what I do in my own assignment handouts (digital or otherwise), which include the following areas: the assignment/project type, a purpose statement, an assignment description, a set of requirements, the evaluative criteria, due dates (for drafts and final version), and a grading statement (how this will fit into the course grade total)—or some variation on these things. To demonstrate these categories/considerations, readers might visit the Adobe Spark page handout for the Investigative Narrative podcast assignment in my current (spring 2019) Rhetoric and Sports course at Indiana University or the Interactive Image Project webpage from my Rhetoric, Play, & Games course, which was last taught a couple years ago.

One of the easiest ways to bring digital literacy and digital creativity into the classroom is by taking an existing assignment and simply asking students to complete that assignment via an alternative platform or in a different form of mediation. Meaning, instructors might take a mid-term quiz or even reflective writing assignment and swap the platform—having students work in Adobe Spark or create a video via Adobe Rush (among others) instead of working in Microsoft Word. By doing this, instructors open the productive elements of the course to an increased array of student capacities of expression, which invites students to think about the task, the challenge, the content in a completely different way. Which is to say, the root orientation changes for students: textual assignments and quizzes have, unfortunately, become reductively aligned with proof of learning and grade assessment, but a rich media project (whether scrolling Spark narrative, interactive webtext, or video essay) shifts the focus toward (a) engagement with the course content, (b) the practices of representing one’s thinking in and through different modes, and (c) conveying ideas and understanding across media.

But this approach, while simple enough in its practice, is not without challenges or critical considerations. I will provide a brief articulation of these elements below, but for a fuller write-up visit my Spark page, Platform Swap: Bringing Digital Literacy into the Classroom.

The challenge for this approach resides is not in the assignment itself, but rather in how to situate and deploy the platform swap in the context of the course. In the regard, there are a few considerations: the reactionary approach (which aligns well with more open-ended assignments), low-stakes learning, and the altering of expectations (and assessment practices).

• While many instructors understand the general maneuvers needed to introduce, deliver, and assess an assignment, the truth is that many often feel at a loss when moving into non-traditional modes. This is where the reactionary approach comes in, which invites instructors to make the platform swap and then see what happens, reacting as things evolve. The keys here are (1) to have a lot of conversation with students at the outset of the assignment so that they understand that the project, its value, and its assessment are organic—taking form as things take shape, and (2) be flexible enough to accommodate change and to develop responses and guidance as one goes.
• The second suggestion is to focus on low-stakes activities (and assignments) and build out toward more complex work. On one hand, this refers to transitions like starting with an Adobe Spark assignment (instead of a traditional writing assignment) and then, later this semester or next semester, moving into video-based assignments or podcasting. On the other hand, this means operating in ways similar to video game learning principles: starting with small practices and engagements that are central to the larger complexities of the upcoming challenge. In this sense, I start with low-stakes in-class learning activities (making visuals in Spark) and use them not only for content engagement but as training for the fuller course assignments.
• The third suggestion, which echos the first consideration in many ways, is to be open to altering one's expectations of an assignment and being amenable to augmenting one's modes and methods of assessment. The simple reality is that taking a regular essay assignment and having students do it as a webtext or as a video does not just produce an essay online or an essay across sequential media. The meaning structures and practices also change, and so instructors have to be cognizant of the fact that the evaluative criteria of an essay do not apply (one-to-one, if at all) to a video essay.

The natural inclination for most teachers, particularly in an assessment saturated era, is to design assignments that clearly and cleanly map onto outcomes. This is, of course, tied at least in part to the corporate university model (see Bill Reading’s University in Ruins), where learning is situated as a commodity and is validated via efficiency measures, but it also linked to several principles where teaching is positioned as a practice of identify key/critical outcomes and creating targeted activities that lead to those outcomes. In all fairness, this model has value in many arenas and does, in fact, work relatively well in pedagogical orientations where assessment is the pinnacle value (i.e., those structures where validating learning and funding and practice are determined by testing results and assessment more so than the immersion in the learning process, development that comes from creative engagement, and value of crafting meaningful experiences rather than measurable efficiencies). But one thing that comes up time and again that tends to push back against the corporate university expectations and these one-to-one instructional models is that learning is not a commodity, and even when it is, it is anything but efficient. In fact, some of the best learning we encounter is messy, unpredictable, and increasingly rooted in the personal (personal identities, personal investments, etc.). And we can use these considerations as the very grounds for bringing the digital into the classroom—finding ways not to direct, in precise terms, the kinds of things students make, but rather creating an opportunity in which students discover, determine, and design their own engagements. This kind of orientation tends to get label as open-ended or open assignment practice and is almost always linked to project based work. And while there are a number of ways of bringing this approach to bear on a class, I want to offer just a couple touchstones that might help those new to this practice begin to find a way into this approach.

The basic orientation is as such: the instructor provides the inventive framework for the project (goals, parameters, obstructions, etc.), while students identify their own exigencies and create projects in relation to that tension, focus, interest, argument, and the like. As part of this orientation, each project (and approach) contributes to the design and delivery of the work, but they must be created and intended for digital distribution and, when completed, should include or be accompanied by a reflective element (or statement of learning) on the part of the student.

For a more detailed look at these orientations and considerations, visit my Spark page, Open-Ended Assignment: Bringing Digital Literacy into the Classroom

But at its core, the orientation here is meant to create opportunities for students to explore projects of interest to them that connect and/or extend the content and thinking of the course. This often results in widely divergent student creations, but the richness of those engagements and the depth of the perspectives and applications they invite in relation to course content, tends to outweigh the challenges of deploying this approach.

Group work or collaborative projects have been a regular staple of higher education for the past handful of decades. But what is perhaps less recognized is the value of a collective project. If readers are familiar with Service Learning approaches, then this approach will seem old hat, but for the rest this may present a new set of considerations for assignment work. The basic principle is this: the entire class engages in a collective project, with individual students and/or groups of students being responsible for completing parts of a project that, when brought together, create an artifact or engagement that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. As one example, an entire class might decide to create a magazine around a given theme or focus rather than producing 15-25 isolated essays; this is, in fact, precisely what one section of ENG 105 students at UNC Chapel Hill did in 2016, creating Scientific Tar Heel. But there are plenty of other models and projects, ranging from having students produce digital and print technical guides for a local library to building a website and a series of blog content for a local non-profit. The goal, in any case, is to get students to work together, to invest in a shared project or engagement, and to reach their goals via collective involvement.

Of course, in this orientation the instructor has to take on many different roles, which range from the traditional teacher perspective to project manager, on-demand recourse to pseudo-client, and so on. Because of this, the collective project orientation can seem daunting, but what it creates, especially for techno-novice instructors, is a learning space in which the teacher and students are partners, with everyone working together to identify the challenges, learn technical know-how, develop technological skills, and present the work to others (as product, but also in relation to design/pitch rationales). This sense of shared responsibility is, in fact, precisely what makes this approach so appealing, and again, it shifts the responsibility for developing technological acumen to the individual students who are completing (or responsible for) those technological aspects of the project. For example, in the magazine example from above, students not only produced research-based content (in the style of a science magazine), but some students served as copyeditors, others learned Adobe InDesign to create the project, others helped with visuals and layout, and so on. Thus, the students and instructors all worked together, and learned together, to produce this artifact or object that was bigger than any of them individually. In videogames we would refer to this as an epic project, where the collective output (a project of notable magnitude) creates an intrinsic value by pursuing what seems like an impossible-to-accomplish task. And those intrinsic qualities seems to be far better at motivating students to learn digital things (creativity, literacy, or otherwise) on their own than a single, static course assignment.

In all honesty, this orientation is the least developed in terms of my own experiences and guides, as it has only been the past couple of years in which I have experimented with these practices. But this process begins, like many other projects, by identifying an exigence and/or audience that could invite a larger project with multiple layers or multiple media types. Which is to say, what instructors should be looking for are not projects, but complexities--entities that invite traditional writing practices, video production, podcasts, website creation, and/or image/poster designs. The challenge is to work with the students to determine the project, its parameters, and then to establish workable goals. In fact, my experience so far indicates that students often come up with collective plans or ideas that cannot legitimately be completed in a semester (particularly if needing to also learn a digital media authoring skill set), and so my role as project manager is to help reign things in as much as anything else.

The last thing I will mention is the need for students to be able to identify their contributions and for instructors to establish avenues for evaluating this work. If there are, in fact, single-authored creations, then this becomes somewhat easier, but even in those cases the individual contribution to the collective doesn’t always neatly fit into assessment metrics. To this end, as a default orientation, I have students keep records of their work (time, contribution, and the like) through the project and, in the end, to use those records and their artifacts to talk about the project and their own learning. I also have them assess the work themselves and to provide something of an assessment of the project as a whole. And, depending on the complexities involved, I have also had students form sub-groups to serve in a variety of functions and then, as part of their assessment work, I have them provide a statement of assessment of each of their sub-group members. This isn’t always necessary but it can help provide a more complete picture for student involvement.

This collective orientation is perhaps the most unwieldy of the three as it has the most moving parts. But it does invite, in many cases, the deepest engagement with a course, its content, and its practices, as there is a shared sense of responsibility for the engagement. Thus, each student has an individual responsibility, but also a collective responsibility to develop meaningful understandings of the content and practices in order to produce a collective artifact (or set of artifacts) that has (have) value.

justinhodgson.com | @postdigitalJH | JH@LinkedIn