The Center for Open Education at Hokkaido University collaborated with Adobe KK to develop OER, fostering critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills required in Digital Literacy (DL) education. In this collaborative research, we developed OER to learn design thinking that underpins essential thinking and creative problem-solving skills for first-year students. Also, we developed a learning program utilizing this OER through production activities that use digital tools, including Adobe Spark.
Improving learning effectiveness utilizing OER, a pedagogical approach is essential. In the learning program, we aim to utilize OER based on the blended learning settings to learn the basic knowledge before the class using the OER and engage in activities to create their own OER while using knowledge in face-to-face settings. We introduced the cycle of investigative learning (Engeström, Hakkarainen & Hedegaard, 1984) to bridge the knowledge and stimulate motivation, orientation, and internalization. In the OER, the learner faces practical difficulties and conflicts grasps the gap between the learning goal and the digital products he/she creates in the class. In the OER, we adopted a structure in which we tackled the quiz without knowledge of the learning content (motivation), learned the tools and usage of thinking in the main part (direction), and finally tackled the same task again (internalization).
In the first-year class in 2020, we introduced blended learning utilizing the OER. The students are actively involved in the pre-learning by OER and the activities to create their own OER. The feedback from students is positive. From the questionaries for students, they learned the effective selection and arrangement of images and methods to align the text and pictures by unifying the colors. We found that these competencies relate to the skills of digital content creation on DLGF.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Learn the practical pedagogical approach utilizing OER
- Learn the practice to introduce investigative learning cycle in the blended-learning settings
- Learn how to combine the OER for pre-learning and activities of OER creation by the students in the class
