Learning in a digital age/LiDA101/Free range learning

“	"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."	”
—Benjamin Franklin

Pedagogy of discovery

This course uses the ‘pedagogy of discovery’ (including self-discovery) to engender a free-range learning approach. This pedagogy incorporates self-directed content gathering and analysis rather than content that is pre-selected by the examiner. This approach is deliberate in order to allow you to seek out information and areas of study of personal interest and relevance to your own career path.

For example, perhaps you are an educator and taking this course for a requirement for a qualification in tertiary education. In this case you may want to focus your studies on a topical area of contemporary teaching and learning. Perhaps you are a learner studying business, and choose to focus your studies on the impact of social media in conducting business in a digital age. Some learners taking this course may choose to focus on a research project assigned in another university-level course. The pedagogy of discovery used in this course will allow you to pursue your own interests by sourcing online and open access materials in achieving the learning objectives.

Open educational resources

Logo for Open Educational Resources (OER)

An important feature of this course is that it uses Open Educational Resources and open access materials as the content basis for your studies. Open Educational Resources (OER) are digital materials that are freely available to educators, students and self/lifelong learners. OER are increasingly being integrated into open and distance education as they are not subject to the same restrictive copyright constraints as other materials. OER are more accessible and freely available to students. There are a number of ways to search for OER and we will explore these during this micro course.

The OERu's course materials are based entirely on OER, therefore you will not incur any textbook costs for your studies with us.