Developing student capacity to produce digital scholarship in the humanities

Abstract

Despite the increased use of technology in higher education classrooms, we need a better understanding of pedagogical strategies that improve student ability to produce quality scholarly digital content in the humanities. This research was designed to examine student learning through scholarly digital storytelling, a technology-enhanced assessment. The researcher collected data during and after an interdisciplinary, graduate scholarly digital storytelling course, including student work, student reflections, and individual interviews, to examine experiences at key points throughout the learning process. The results indicate that this pedagogical approach, when carefully scaffolded alongside formative feedback and ongoing student support, can increase student capacity—including digital agency, problem-solving skills, and digital knowledge production skills—to produce scholarly digital work in the humanities. Students can also learn to understand the interplay between disciplinary learning and digital skills and the ways in which both are essential for scholarly communication within and beyond the classroom.

Keywords

Technology-enhanced assessment scholarly digital storytelling graduate education digital agency problem-solving digital knowledge production

Introduction

Demand for graduates from institutions of higher education who are digitally literate is well established (Bozalek et al., 2013), but there is growing consensus that technical skills alone are not enough (Blaschke and Hase, 2015; López-Meneses et al., 2020; Van Laar et al., 2017). The workplace of the present and the future requires graduates, including those from the humanities, who can adapt to the “rapidly changing environment within which we and our graduates operate” (American Historical Association, n.d.; Oliver and Jorre de St Jorre, 2018: 821). Sparks et al. (2016) similarly discuss the importance of “problem-solving in technology-rich environments” (3) and define digital literacy as the ability to “proficiently engage with the digital information landscape in the service of solving authentic information-based problems” (7).

While the use of digital tools has increased dramatically in higher education over the last few decades and research has demonstrated the potential for digital technologies to “open up new ways of learning” (Gros et al., 2016: vii), more work needs to be done. Recent studies have concluded that technology in higher education has been overly focused on the “‘logistics’ of university study” (Henderson et al., 2017: 1570) rather than on transforming teaching and learning (Bond et al., 2018; Bozalek et al., 2015; Castañeda and Selwyn, 2018; Mercader and Gairín, 2020; Price and Kirkwood, 2014; Sweeney et al., 2017). Researchers, policy institutes, and international organizations advocate change toward, as Bond et al. (2018) write, “strategies that will foster a range of twenty-first century skills, enabling students to use technology in flexible, adaptive, and innovative ways” (1). The goal is to cultivate more active and participatory uses of digital technology (Bozalek et al., 2015; Henderson, et al., 2017; Iordache et al., 2017), including an emphasis on learners as producers rather than consumers (Passey et al., 2018).

A key question remains about how to implement these goals into humanities classrooms through pedagogical strategies that lead to meaningful change (Bond et al., 2020; Silber-Varod et al., 2019). Digital humanities provides important models for drawing together digital tools with disciplinary approaches to cultivate “new powers of analysis, comparison, and understanding” (Berry, 2019) and advocates for using these powers to contribute to public conversations and knowledge (Berry, 2019; Gold and Klein, 2019). Scholarly digital storytelling is a pedagogical approach that has the potential to integrate academic research and digital skills to craft scholarly arguments (Schrum, 2021; Snelson, 2018). The focus of this technology-enhanced assessment is on blending “disciplinary knowledge and knowledge practices in a new digital context” (Littlejohn et al., 2012: 548; Oppermann, 2008). This does not happen automatically (Murray and Pérez, 2014), but requires purposeful scaffolding and we need more models in the humanities for effective implementation. This article presents research conducted in an interdisciplinary, graduate-level scholarly digital storytelling course taught at a large research institution in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The research explores the ways in which a technology-enhanced assessment can be implemented to develop student capacity for producing scholarly digital content that is inherently both scholarly and digital.

Literature review

While digital storytelling is not a new concept, scholarly digital storytelling has emerged as a distinct pedagogical practice. The word “scholarly” is fundamental to this practice as it is designed to engage students in what Burdick, et al., define as the “intertwinings of scholarly method, computational capacity, and new modes of knowledge formation” (2012: 5). Researchers have found benefits to teaching with scholarly digital storytelling, including student engagement (Benmayor, 2008; Clarke and Adam, 2012; Fletcher and Cambre, 2009; Singh, 2014), intellectual growth (Coventry, 2008; Nesteruk, 2015), and digital literacy (Gachago et al., 2015) as well as challenges, including frustration with technical problems (Bedenlier et al., 2020; Gachago et al., 2015; Snelson, 2018).

These benefits do not appear by simply adding a new assignment into an existing syllabus. Incorporating scholarly digital storytelling into a formal higher education learning environment requires careful design to cultivate digital skills intertwined with disciplinary understanding and narrative. This pedagogical practice is most effective when intentionally scaffolded to layer “learning interventions designed to encourage students to build their understanding, confidence, skill, and agency” (Coulson and Harvey, 2013: 404). Effective scaffolding also requires “strategic teaching interventions” (Coulson and Harvey, 2013: 403) and “just-in-time support” (Belland, 2014: 505) as student learning does not develop in a linear fashion. This support includes ongoing feedback paired with modeling, questioning, and managing frustration (Belland, 2014) and is especially important for developing the complex abilities required for scholarly digital storytelling.

The scholarly digital storytelling course discussed here was designed to implement a heutagogical approach “grounded in humanistic and constructivist principles” (Blaschke and Hase, 2015: 25) where learners are self-directed with a focus on “development of learner capacity and capability” (Gros, 2016: 13). This approach can be supported by technology while simultaneously supporting student development of digital agency (Gros, 2016; Schindler et al., 2017). While some students initially find this intimidating and at times uncomfortable (Bendelier et al., 2020; Blaschke and Hase, 2015), they typically adapt and persevere as they learn to evaluate and solve digital challenges (Blaschke and Hase, 2015; McClurken, 2012; Sleeter et al., 2019).

Digital agency, problem-solving skills, and digital knowledge production skills appear frequently in the literature on emerging technologies and teaching and learning with technology (Bond et al., 2020; Buitrago and Chiappe, 2019; Spante et al., 2018). This section will explore each concept separately to provide a foundation for the research on student capacity to produce scholarly digital content.

Terms such as digital competence, digital literacy, and digital fluency are used in higher education literature to capture a shift away from tools and tool manipulation (Spante et al., 2018) and toward abilities, such as knowing when and how to use various technologies (Carretero et al., 2019; Gachago et al., 2015), learning to communicate effectively (Alexander et al., 2019), and applying skills “across different areas and dimensions of knowledge” (López Meneses et al., 2020: 70). Passey et al. (2018) define digital agency as “the individual’s ability to control and adapt to a digital world” (426). This definition encompasses an essential task for the humanities in higher education—teaching students how to learn new technologies and utilize them to create new forms of scholarship (Berry, 2019; Burdick et al., 2012). Technology is changing quickly and teaching one tool is of limited value (Smith et al., 2020). The goal is to empower students “to deal with new technologies” so they can “adopt, adapt to and use them wisely and responsibly” (Passey, et al., 2018: 427) and with confidence. This mindset encourages “more complex” and “free engagement” with digital media, and therefore “enhances the development of digital skills” (Iordache et al., 2017: 15).

Problems encountered today, especially in a digital world, are increasingly defined as “complex” (Silber-Varod et al., 2019: 3101) and today’s students need “the ability to effectively solve problems in a technology-rich environment” (Murray and Pérez, 2014). Complex problems do not have simple solutions. The ability to break down, untangle, and approach the many parts of a problem is desirable yet difficult to teach (Bozalek et al., 2015; Van Laar et al., 2017). Higher education can help students develop the resilience and persistence needed to approach ill-defined problems (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2015; Iordache et al., 2017), and scholarly digital storytelling, through its iterative and open-ended nature, provides an opportunity to practice and sharpen these skills.

Creating scholarly digital content is defined as a “fundamental digital competency” globally (López-Meneses et al., 2020: 82), reflecting a growing focus on active production of knowledge over passive consumption (Bedenlier et al., 2020; Carretero et al., 2019; Redecker and Punie, 2017). Technology-enhanced assessments, such as scholarly digital storytelling, integrate technical skills such as filming, designing media assets, and editing to produce a final product (Snelson, 2018) while remaining grounded in academic research and disciplinary content. The work of editing, for example, is “productive and generative” and it shapes and defines a scholarly argument (Burdick et al., 2012). Scholarly digital storytelling can engage students in negotiating their own agency and authority, require visual thinking and manipulation that may be less familiar in text-based disciplines (Fletcher and Cambre, 2009), and teach students to craft scholarly arguments in the humanities in new ways (Coventry, 2008; Oppermann, 2008; Singh, 2014).

Methodology

Castañeda and Selwyn (2018) write that “it is striking how little is known about the relationships between technology use and learning” and that many studies of technology use in higher education “appear remarkably incurious about how learning” takes place (2). The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is grounded in the study of student learning (Felten, 2013) and provides valuable models for this work. Scholarship of teaching and learning scholars and researchers who focus on technology in higher education, however, note the need for more qualitative research in this area, including student interviews and multiple data points throughout a semester and across semesters as well as more work focused on graduate students (Bedenlier et al., 2020; Bernstein, 2018; Chick, 2014; Manarin et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2020). There is also a need for more evidence related to effective scaffolding, including engaging students in iterative skill development (Swan et al., 2019).

This qualitative study aims to contribute to these conversations by drawing on data collected from graduate students across multiple disciplines who completed a scholarly digital storytelling course at a large, public, research-intensive university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It asks the following research question: In what ways does a technology-enhanced assessment develop student capacity to produce scholarly digital work?

Schrum began collecting data to research this question in 2018, conducting 32 individual, semi-structured interviews with master’s and doctoral level students, close to half of all students who have taken the course. Course work, including blog posts, project updates, final reflections, and scholarly digital stories, was collected to provide multiple artifacts of student learning at key points during and after the course (Chick, 2014). All interviews were collected after the course ended and grades were submitted. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants and all procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional ethics review board.

Among the students interviewed, 22 identified as female, nine as male, and one as non-binary. The students who participated in this research studied history, rhetoric, or higher education and took the course at different phases in their graduate work, from first-year master’s to advanced doctoral. Interview questions focused on student learning experiences throughout the digital storytelling process and reflections after completing the course. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, verified, and validated through member checking and, along with student course work, coded and analyzed using thematic analysis, a data-driven qualitative research method (Braun and Clark, 2006; Nowell et al., 2017: 2). Initial phases of familiarization and code generation were followed by theme development and review. During this iterative process, additional themes were developed and the data were reviewed again for referential adequacy (Nowell et al., 2017). A graduate research assistant reviewed the data and the themes independently and collaboratively with Schrum.

Course design

Students in the scholarly digital storytelling course created individual, 10-minute digital stories or non-linear digital projects for a clearly defined audience, including academic conferences, higher education classrooms, and work settings, such as higher education administration, policy institutes, or museums. This was the major course assessment and, as outlined in the syllabus, students were required to develop the digital skills to communicate scholarly work (Schrum, 2020). The course was constructed to build students’ digital skills and confidence as they examined academic research and scholarly communication in new ways (Coulson and Harvey, 2013; Yang and Wu, 2012). This “extensive scaffolding” (Seraphin et al., 2019: 88) aimed to increase self-regulated learning in a supportive environment including cycles of formative feedback and revision.

Students completed small, low-stakes digital projects throughout the semester to develop capacity and confidence. These typically included an initial assignment before class, in-class work with the assignment, and revisions. Digital Project A, for example, asked students to tell a story using 10 images. Students worked in pairs during class and each student listened while their partner described the story as they saw it. They then made revisions to tell the story using five images and discussed this version with another partner. This assignment has several goals, including learning to: communicate visually; listen to others interpret their story; understand the value of iterative development; and make difficult decisions about essential content and narrative.

For Digital Project B, students created a one-minute video during the third week of class that introduced their scholarly digital story concept and wrote a short reflection. They similarly workshopped the video in class and made revisions. In Digital Project C, students created a two-minute “life in a day” video using software they selected for their final project. The goal was to practice crafting a digital story, filming, fine tuning narrative, and completing the entire production and post-production cycle. Digital Project D required students to create a 30-second trailer for their final project. At that point in the process, they were deep in the content and narrative and this required them to step back and think about the larger story, the core message, and what would be compelling for their audience. This also provided another opportunity to experience the entire production and post-production process using digital editing software.

In addition to the digital projects, the class engaged regularly in scholarly digital story critiques. Each student selected a scholarly digital story and presented it to the class along with a critique highlighting the genre, technical choices, scholarly argument, strengths, and weaknesses. After watching the story in class, students discussed it as a group. Students also read and discussed scholarly work exploring genre, forms of storytelling, teaching and learning with digital storytelling, copyright, and interactivity.

The scholarly digital story assignment was carefully scaffolded throughout the semester. Initial assignments included a project pitch and revised project pitch, storyboard for mapping out the narrative and media, interview questions and release forms when relevant, annotated bibliography, treatment (description of visuals, audio, and narration), copyright assessment, rough cut (rough draft of the scholarly digital story), credits, full scholarly digital story for screening in class, and final version. In addition, students wrote project updates and completed a summary and a final reflection at the end of the semester.

The purposefully scaffolded structure of this course required ongoing feedback from “a community of knowledge creators” (Seraphin et al., 2019: 88). Students worked in small groups to discuss the techniques and the craft of telling scholarly stories. They discussed scholarly work on genre as well as what shapes a scholarly narrative and how to make a compelling academic argument in a digital format. The instructor provided formative feedback on each assignment, from the digital projects through each piece of the final project. This required “one-to-one scaffolding” (Belland, 2014: 507) and individualized attention (Swan et al., 2019) designed to support students as they developed the capacity to produce scholarly digital work, a new skill for many students in the course.

Students explored topics grounded in their academic interests and, following an inquiry-based model (Rodriguez et al., 2019; Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010; Swan et al., 2019), they developed a story grounded in original research. One student initially pitched a descriptive story about the history of the library in the US House of Representatives. Digging into library’s past, however, he learned about a formerly enslaved man who became the head librarian during the Reconstruction era and the student’s story in the end explored the intersections of race, bureaucracy, and Washington, D.C. in the years after the Civil War. Another student was fascinated by a popular national park. The visitors who hike its trails pass physical reminders, such as broken building foundations and cemeteries, of the people who were displaced to create this scenic space. She located a range of primary sources, including oral histories, photographs, and federal records, as well as secondary sources on the history of the park and eminent domain. She hiked the trails and took her own photographs to document the subtle reminders of the past that are visible today and to weave together a fascinating and complicated history. These examples and others available online (scholarlydigitalstorytelling.org/stories) demonstrate the scholarly nature of these digital stories.

Findings

Digital agency

A key purpose of the scholarly digital storytelling course is to teach students how to learn, apply, and adapt digital skills and tools by doing—attempting, practicing, rethinking, and refining content and skills in a supportive environment. The low-stakes assignments are designed to value student efforts to experiment and, in the process, to learn how to learn. The iterative final project assignments, similarly, require progress throughout the semester while allowing room for growth and skill development. Tracy, a student with low confidence in her technical skills at the start of the class, for example, recalled in an interview that she told herself it was “time to make the bed, as they say. Sit down and watch the tutorial.” She discovered that despite her hesitation, it was “easy to follow” and she was able to “implement what they’re talking about.” Sean similarly noted in an interview that he appreciated the course design, “having people learn it on their own—I think it’s really useful. . . it leads to deeper learning. . . . not teach a man to fish but teach yourself to fish.” Adam described a similar experience during an interview, “it was trial and error, just getting in there and using the tool.” He concluded, “I don’t think there’s any substitute for going in, just messing around . . . You’re not going to hurt anything. You’re not going to break anything.”

While some digital skills required additional instructor support, students were generally able to find solutions and, in doing so, learn how to frame, research, and answer their own questions. This increased students’ digital agency. Gillian wrote in a final reflection that “the biggest takeaway from participating in a digital storytelling class is that feeling of empowerment and confidence at the end because you were able to do something that was probably outside of your comfort zone.” She concluded that this experience opened, “another avenue for learning to share and receive knowledge.” This sentiment was echoed frequently by students in blog posts, reflections, and interviews. Sabrina offered advice to future students, saying, “Don’t be afraid to try a bunch of different technical stuff. Spend an hour trying something. If it doesn’t work, that’s ok. Now you know that doesn’t work.” This attitude is critical in a rapidly changing world as it validates effort and willingness to experiment as much as it values the final product.

Students noted that the process of learning to learn digital skills was time consuming and at times frustrating, but also meaningful. Aisyah remembered in an interview her feeling of impatience, “I wanted to rush through the process because I wanted to go straight to my project.” She realized, though, that she needed to give herself “grace and time to learn because when I learned, after I acquired the skills . . . it is easier. So it’s a process that I cannot rush through.” Lena similarly recalled in an interview that she could remember exactly “how many nights, how many days I spent on the story” because the experience was intense, immersive, and rewarding. Sonia said in an interview, “I don’t think there is any other way to teach that well . . .. to actually have a group walk through the process and be responsible for all the different steps.”

Natasha, an experienced higher education administrator, provides a good example of a student developing digital agency and the capacity to learn. She recalled in an interview that she started the class as “the worst person with technology.” She described herself as “someone who’s not tech savvy” and she initially found digital storytelling “intimidating” and “frustrating.” She reflected after the semester ended, though, that “it was actually better than I imagined because I really learned more. . . it really was, in the end, more than just the finished project. It was what I learned throughout the process and what I walked away with.” She wrote in her final reflection that while she initially considered quitting, the structure of the course, including in-class workshops and regular feedback, helped her “feel it’s okay if you don’t know these things.” She recognized that she had to “get in there and start doing it. . . it really started to build my confidence.” Natasha experienced a significant challenge when her video editing software released a major update mid-semester. She recalled that she struggled to adapt and to relearn some of the basics, but in the end, she “learned that technology moves forward and I had to appreciate the new pieces in the new technology.” She recognized that the process of learning the tool the first time helped her adjust to the updated version. After completing the class, Natasha reported feeling confident participating in conversations about digital content. She described her “sense of accomplishment at the end. Or as I say now, ‘I know how to do that!’”

Problem-solving skills

Problem-solving requires resilience and persistence and these are purposefully taught through the scaffolded assignments. Learning to create a scholarly digital story over the course of a semester involves many open-ended decisions and students reflected on the importance of attitude to their success. Adam concluded that, “if you approach it with an open mind, I think you can come away with a great experience.” Ashley similarly shared in an interview the importance of, “being open to continually making changes, continually editing, just be open to that.” She noted that at the end of the course, this ability was what she felt “most confident in.”

Lena wrote in a blog post that she had to “rewrite my script a couple of times because I realized that 10 minutes goes by rather quickly. I think I was just trying to add too much to my story.” This is a common experience and one that is best learned through rounds of practice, feedback, and revision. What are the essential elements of a scholarly digital story? How can they be communicated to the target audience? How can one navigate unanticipated challenges, such as cancelled interviews or damaged audio files? These are real problems experienced throughout the process. Madison recalled in an interview:

there were some things that I created four or five times again and again and again across platforms to figure out how does this work and will it still maintain that [look]. And the timing of it and the visual movement of it. How can I make that seem as seamless as possible?

Madison’s experience also demonstrates the iterative nature of authentic problem-solving and she further reflected that this was one of a very few learning experiences that would “stick with me”:

I think I did devote 10 times the amount of time to it because I’m problematizing, I’m digging in, I’m playing with it. I’m learning new things. . . being able to connect with all parts of that process has been really powerful.

This speaks to the problem-solving abilities students developed. Some skills were taught during in-class workshops, but much of the learning, because it was so individualized, happened throughout the semester. Working within a scaffolded and supportive environment encouraged students to approach each problem with the confidence that they could devise a solution. Jessica recalled in an interview that she was “worried about failing and being a failure,” but in retrospect, “there was nowhere for that to happen. The class was set up that some ideas may not work, but at no point was it going to be a failure. There were no bad stories.” Belinda recalled that the background for her first interview was “staged so poorly” but then “you realize what you did wrong.” She explored campus looking for better filming locations and discovered that this was a “learnable” skill and “you get this eye for it.” Amanda recalled in an interview that she “pushed myself to do just a few more things” and it “was really hard sometimes. I had this vision of what I wanted in my head and the vision wasn’t always the reality.” In the end, she concluded that “it was good to push myself in that way” while also learning that “sometimes it was okay to just have it be what it was.” This balance provided an invaluable lesson for future open-ended digital and scholarly pursuits. Amanda concluded that “you might have this huge dream of winning an Oscar, but maybe you’re just going to get a good grade. It’s okay, it’s all right.”

Brooke embraced her newly developed problem-solving skills, stating in an interview that “it didn’t matter if you messed up because you could take a mistake and make it something great. And I think that was awesome.” She learned that “you can’t get discouraged when, say, the video you want to use, you can’t use it. Or the picture that you thought would be perfect doesn’t exist.” As several students noted, they had rarely experienced this kind of problem-solving throughout their formal education. Creating a digital story grounded in academic research encouraged them to reframe their approach to scholarship as well as to resolving technical challenges.

Digital knowledge production skills

Burdick et al. (2012) define digital humanities as a “generative practice” that “demands an additive pedagogy” (10) and this applies to scholarly digital storytelling as well. While some argue that digital history should expand its focus on interpretation and scholarly arguments (Robertson and Mullen, 2021), scholarly digital storytelling already embraces this fully as students conduct research, craft an argument, and learn to communicate scholarly work through a digital medium. Beyond mastering the basic aesthetic and technical aspects of digital storytelling and post-production, students learn to implement them as “the means with which to investigate and articulate an idea” (Burdick et al., 2012: 14). They must understand and appreciate the role of visuals and audio in communicating scholarly work, and the ways in which format shapes both message and reception. This work builds on the techniques and strategies of documentary film, but it also draws on the more recent affordances of the digital world. Students learn to manage audio, images, and video and to utilize digital editing tools, for example, zooming in on a satellite image of the world to demonstrate the importance of place and geography to the topic. Other students created maps, data visualizations, and multimedia content, such as recording game play, to craft an argument about the construction of narrative in open world games.

One of the most essential lessons students learn is that their final scholarly product must incorporate all of these elements. Nathan wrote in a blog post that, “Each and every choice WILL have an impact. Lighting, audio, angles, voice, background, etc., all convey certain notions which will influence the viewers.” Karen recalled in an interview her experience with the process of becoming “a purposeful thinker,” including learning to ask herself, “Why did you choose those pictures? Or why did you choose that music? Why did you choose that font or that scene?” Sabrina wrote in her final reflection about the challenge she faced regarding “how to best present the information in a digital format” and to “draw attention to mostly illegible 18^th-century handwriting in a meaningful way.” In the end, she felt that she had “visually and academically” succeeded in “highlight[ing] the fragmented primary sources” of her story. The experience also helped students develop skills as consumers of media and digital content. Natasha wrote in her final reflection that she could now “understand the things we see all the time that we take for granted when viewing movies or documentaries” and had gained “the knowledge of why these things are important and the role they play in helping you tell your story.”

These examples also demonstrate an awareness of the ways in which digital scholarship differs from traditional writing assignments. While some disciplines emphasize visual thinking, many students taking this class have spent their academic careers consuming and producing texts. Lena shared in her interview, “I think the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’—it literally is true.” Kendra provided an example in her interview of her growing awareness of this concept while describing a classmate’s digital story, “she had that beautiful clip through the house and you could see the gentle ripple of the grass when the wind blew. I can almost feel the wind. I can feel and hear walking through this beautiful, open entryway.” For Kendra, this same opening segment evoked an “emotional and physical response” that made the digital story “more impactful.” Keith had a similar experience with his work in military history:

I found a video of Marines who were running in their full gear down the street in a sandstorm. It was one of the videos that I used and that spoke volumes. And that would have been something that if I was writing a paper, I have to explain “This is why they are miserable — because their gear is heavy and there’s sand everywhere.” With that video, I can convey that and then talk about something else on top of that. So that was a pretty powerful tool that you don’t get in other formats.

Students also regularly discussed their experience with audio, from learning to appreciate the tone and rhythm of a narrator to the mood of background music. Mark wrote in a blog that he was “struck” by the power of audio, “If the tone is jovial when the story is not or the speed is too slow or too fast, the story loses some of its strength and momentum.” Madison described the many hours she spent listening to royalty-free music “to see what seemed right” and how “surprisingly, finding music really helped pull things together in an unexpected way.” This realization forced students to make hard decisions about content and message. Belinda wrote in her final reflection that “Ultimately, I removed numerous segments that were powerful, but would not fit. . .. Deciding to cut powerful segments because of poor audio quality was also difficult.” Sean shared in an interview that he “wrote and rewrote the opening” to fit the background music while Brooke surprised herself by caring deeply about the authenticity of a gunshot sound effect, “you don’t ever think that these are things that you need to worry about, but you do . . . you develop a new way of how you look at it.”

Learning to see, hear, and understand these many facets of digital work fundamentally reshapes students’ understanding of scholarship. Natasha wrote in a blog post, “the focus should not be to find the one best way to tell my story but to . . . understand what I’m trying to convey and know my audience.” Mark recalled in his interview that he developed a new sense of purpose for his doctoral work, “I’m not just trying to write for that specific audience. I’m trying to think about my research and its impact” by providing “information to a broader audience in a way that is consumable” and in ways that were “vastly different to the ones that I had been engaging with otherwise.” Belinda discussed in her interview the potential to “reach an audience that I really think needs to have more information” and noted that digital stories were “something that I feel like people can relate to so much more than an article in a journal.”

Combining academic research with digital skills forces students to ask new questions and rethink scholarly communication. Keith observed that the secret was making the complicated scholarly and technical decisions invisible, stating “if it works well, you don’t notice a lot of it.” This is a powerful lesson that can only be learned through hands-on digital knowledge production in a scaffolded environment. Once learned, however, it is difficult to forget.

Discussion

The European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (Redecker and Punie, 2017) defines a “digitally-competent educator” as one who mentors students in “progressively more autonomous learning endeavours” while fostering their “active and creative engagement” (20) with disciplinary content and “complex problem-solving” (22). Scholarly digital storytelling provides one model for achieving these goals in an interdisciplinary, graduate-level course where the primary assessment was the creation of digital scholarship. An essential component was the fundamental integration of digital skills with disciplinary thinking and scholarship (Snelson, 2018). This provided an authentic purpose for learning digital skills and, through the process, introduced new ways of asking scholarly questions and communicating academic research. This approach demonstrated one of the ways that formal learning assessments can “encourage the ‘high-level’ use of technology” (Gros, 2016: 18).

The research presented indicates several key ways in which scholarly digital storytelling can develop student capacity to produce scholarly digital work in the humanities, specifically cultivating digital agency, problem-solving skills, and digital knowledge production skills. Sweeney et al. (2017) write that “the critical element of effective technology-enhanced assessment is being able to discern the nuances between the affordances of specific technologies and how these can support assessment for learning” (53). Affordances are the qualities or properties the technology brings to education and they alone do not lead to enhanced learning. The relevant issue is how technology is utilized and implemented, including pedagogical strategies for integrating technology into scholarly assignments (Smith et al., 2020).

Scaffolding is especially important when introducing new technologies and new ways of thinking (Bond and Bedenlier, 2019; Cochrane et al., 2015; Coulson and Harvey, 2013) and was carefully implemented in this course. Key pedagogical strategies included in-class workshops, low-stakes digital assignments, extensive digital resources, open labs for individual work and consultation, and meaningful, ongoing feedback from the instructor and classmates. In recent years, an undergraduate experienced in media production has provided additional support throughout the semester, teaching skills and helping students learn to resolve technical issues. Students noted the value of these structures and supports. Sean and Sonia, for example, appreciated the pedagogical approach to teaching the capacity to learn, while Sabrina, Jessica, and Brooke remembered specific conversations or feedback that encouraged their learning.

Student writings and comments captured the sense of frustration and exasperation that all students felt at some point in the semester. This is not uncommon with technology-enhanced assessments (Bedenlier et al., 2020; Blaschke and Hase, 2015) and with digital storytelling (Snelson, 2018) and was typical here as well for students regardless of their digital skill level at the start of the course. Aisyah, for example, remembered feeling impatient and several students recalled their significant time investment, whether identifying filming locations, rewriting scripts, searching for appropriate music, or recreating visual assets.

Student willingness to devote significant time to skill development as well as the final project indicates a high level of engagement and a growing capacity for iterative thinking. These students cared deeply about their projects and about effectively communicating their research. This kind of self-regulation and willingness to go beyond basic requirements indicates cognitive engagement that can lead to deeper learning and student empowerment (Bond and Bedenlier, 2019). Students, such as Gillian, Natasha, and Ashley, exhibited pride in their accomplishments, including digital skill development. Sabrina reflected that she had “to learn a lot more in order to tell this story the way I wanted to. And then realize[d] that I can do it. That was great, too.”

Technology-enhanced assessments such as scholarly digital storytelling demonstrate potential to increase student capacity to create meaningful work that is both scholarly and digital. It promotes the larger goal of “continually rethink[ing] knowledge practices in light of changing social and technological environments” (Littlejohn et al., 2012: 552) within disciplinary contexts. This includes development of digital skills as well as ability to tell an engaging story grounded in disciplinary knowledge and research. This is relevant in the context of the growing awareness that college graduates require digital literacy along with other key skills, including flexible thinking, resilience, and the ability to adapt to new communication formats and changing environments. Scholarly digital storytelling may provide one model for improving student learning with technology-enhanced assessments in higher education.

Future work

Many faculty are not well prepared to teach digital literacy and to integrate technology-enhanced assessments into their classrooms (Gros, 2016; Spante et al., 2018). Professional development can help humanities faculty learn digital skills and literacies but should also emphasize strategies for effectively using technology in pedagogically sound ways (Bond et al., 2018; Mercader and Gairín, 2020). There is a need to expand research focused explicitly on student learning related to technology-enhanced assessments (Bond et al., 2020; Keppell et al., 2015), including how students learn and how to measure growth in both content knowledge and digital skills. There is some evidence of effective use of technology-enhanced assessments, including scholarly digital storytelling, across disciplines (Fletcher and Cambre, 2009; Keppel et al., 2015; Schrum et al., 2021; Singh, 2014) and this research could be expanded. Faculty could be encouraged to share examples of technology-enhanced assessments, including assignments, rubrics, and student work, to promote adoption and adaptation and to continue expanding this field of knowledge.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kelly Schrum

Author Biography

Kelly Schrum is a historian and an associate professor of higher education at George Mason University and co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry. Schrum's research and teaching focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and on teaching and learning in the digital age, including online learning and scholarly digital storytelling. Schrum has directed more than 60 digital humanities projects with funding from federal and state agencies and foundations. Schrum has published widely, including recent articles on scholarly digital storytelling and teaching historical thinking online, and presents her work nationally and internationally.

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