How to Incorporate Digital Tools with Evidence-Based Teaching Practices

Transform Learning, a new instructional resource hub featuring digitally enabled, evidence-based teaching practices (DE-EBTs), has two goals: make proven instructional methods more actionable, and make visible how learner-centered practices can be supported by digital teaching and learning tools.

DE-EBTs are a set of eight practices that research demonstrates improve the effectiveness of teaching and lead to more successful learning outcomes for students. Transform Learning is a new resource available to learn about them, addressing both faculty who may not be familiar DE-EBTs such as formative practice or active learning, and educators who might have a good grasp of the teaching practices and want to ensure they are using them or take their practice to the next level.

Transform Learning is particularly focused on addressing the gap in digital implementation, demonstrating how digital learning technologies or courseware features support good teaching.

To illuminate the intersection between teaching practices and digital enablement, Transform Learning includes an instructional example library featuring specific activities, assignments, or quiz formats that individual faculty have submitted along with explanations of how they incorporated digital learning tools into their instructional practices.

In addition to the examples library, Transform Learning devotes single pages to each of the DE-EBTs to make them more digestible, defining each one, referring to the research supporting it, and outlining key dimensions. For example, in the case of active learning, the three dimensions are:

• students as co-participants
• professor facilitated
• student engagement

Once users navigate to the example library, they can filter by implementation effort and specific academic subject. The goal of the growing library is that an early-career chemistry faculty member will see relevant active learning experiences, which may differ from what’s relevant for a senior statistics faculty member. The examples in the library also represent many different institution types.

Two-way learning

Though instructors and faculty development professionals are a key audience for Transform Learning, instructional technology specialists on campus and course developers can also benefit from these resources. A comprehensive hub that breaks down the components of an EBT like instructional transparency — and makes vivid how different faculty achieve that in the real world — helps a developer understand the features instructors and students would benefit from. In the case of instructional transparency, it might be a way for instructors to make explicit the learning outcomes of a given activity.

Every Learner Everywhere hopes faculty dedicated to effective teaching and student success see contributing to instructional examples library as a quick but meaningful way to their field by sharing the practices and digital tools that work for their students. Faculty who have their own examples to submit to the library can do so through the submission form. Every Learner collaborates with faculty to develop a robust example for the library.