The digital revolution has transformed the educational space, and Durham is at the forefront of this transition. The University encourages the integration of advanced technology and digital resources in its courses, promoting innovative pedagogy, broadening access, and preparing students for a digital world.
The practice of using digital technologies within learning and teaching has been widely promoted in the HE sector for more than three decades. The premise of digital learning is that digital technologies encourage and facilitate education reform, where learners shift from being passive receptors of information to self-regulated, active participants in the construction of knowledge (Shroff et al., 2019 opens in a new window). Of course, the technologies used within the sector have changed over time.
Panellists in the 2020 Educause Horizon Report opens in a new window (conducted pre-Covid) were asked to describe emerging technologies and practices they believed would have a significant impact on the future of post-secondary teaching and learning. Their responses included: adaptive learning technologies; Artificial Intelligence/machine learning education applications; analytics for student success; elevation of instructional design, learning engineering and User Experience (UX) design in pedagogy; Open Educational Resources; and extended reality (XR) technologies.
AI is already being used as part curriculum design, but the panel anticipated that it will increasingly be used to provide feedback on student work. It may also have applications for refining language translation and for improving access for students with visual or hearing impairments. Applications that give students access to learning analytics are also becoming more common, enabling students to access and track their individual data through visualisations (Educause, 2020 opens in a new window).