Digital Pedagogy: Digital Publishing

What is digital publishing?

​Digital publishing projects engage students with the publishing process, including curating material, collaborative meaning making, and communicating scholarship to a particular audience. 

Learning objectives for digital assignments

Learning objectives are clearly defined statements of expected goals and outcomes from the student perspective. When a student finishes an activity or a lesson, what will they know, articulate, or be able to do?

Every digital pedagogy project should have learning objectives. Here are a few tips for creating student-centered objectives:

• Relate the project to course objectives - what's the purpose of this digital element? Examples may include learning the digital tool, applying class knowledge, or communicating their research.
• Consider transferable skills (creating a visual argument) rather than hard skills (use a dashboard in Tableau).
• Create a rubric around the learning objectives to use when evaluating students' work.
• Focus on the process, not the final product. 

Getting started: try Bloom's Taxonomy Action Verbs for sample action verbs to use in learning objectives.

Example learning objectives for digital publishing

Students will be able to...

• identify and critique institutional, infrastructural, and social barriers to accessing and contributing scholarly information.
• collaborate with peers to create a contextualized body of work with a cohesive tone and thematic arc.

Tools & Tutorials

Below are tools and guides to help you start a digital publishing project:

Scalar - a free, open-source multimodal publishing platform that supports non-linear pathways and interlinked elements.

WordPress - a user-friendly website publishing platform.

UNC affiliates can create WordPress sites for free by logging in to web.unc.edu with their ONYEN and password.

Omeka - an open source online platform for creating exhibits that supports extensive metadata.

PubPub - a free open source collaborative publishing platform.

PowerPoint - a user-friendly software application that can be used to create flexible formatting for text and images (settings can be changed from a presentation-style layout).

Students can download the Microsoft Suite for free through the ITS Software Acquisition site.

Icon "layout" by Irman Firmansyah from the Noun Project

Finding Help

Resources 

• Student-Made E-Books: A Beautiful Way to Demonstrate Learning (How to Turn an PowerPoint into an E-Book) by Jennifer Gonzalez on Cult of Pedagogy 

Library Support

To get started with digital pedagogy and lesson planning after exploring this guide, contact Sarah Morris (semorris@email.unc.edu or (919) 962-2094).

• To work with a subject specialist, contact your Subject Librarian from Research and Instructional Services.
• For project planning and technical support, schedule a consultation with a specialist from Library Data Services.
• For help working with design and media, contact Winifred Fordham Metz (freddie@email.unc.edu), head of the Media & Design Center.

Table of Contents

• What is digital publishing?
• Creating learning objectives
• Tools & tutorials
• Sample project gallery
• Finding help