When Vinny Ong applied for an internship at Bryn Mawr College’s Library and Information Technology Services this past summer, she wasn’t looking to develop digital skills. Ong, a sophomore who plans to major in linguistics, was drawn instead to the project she would be working on: helping to preserve an endangered indigenous language.
But unbeknownst to Ong, Bryn Mawr was making a big push to ensure that its graduates possess — and can articulate to employers — a set of digital competencies ranging from basic skills like database searching to more-advanced ones like algorithmic thinking. The internship at the library, part of a program that includes some 100 to 120 students each year, was designed with an eye toward helping students cultivate those competencies.
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When Vinny Ong applied for an internship at Bryn Mawr College’s Library and Information Technology Services this past summer, she wasn’t looking to develop digital skills. Ong, a sophomore who plans to major in linguistics, was drawn instead to the project she would be working on: helping to preserve an endangered indigenous language.
But unbeknownst to Ong, Bryn Mawr was making a big push to ensure that its graduates possess — and can articulate to employers — a set of digital competencies ranging from basic skills like database searching to more-advanced ones like algorithmic thinking. The internship at the library, part of a program that includes some 100 to 120 students each year, was designed with an eye toward helping students cultivate those competencies.
Over the summer, Ong helped create morphology slides that instructors could use to show how words in the language are formed. That required her to learn some programming, and to use digital-communication platforms with her collaborators.
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Ong realized that the technical skills she had picked up during her internship “could really help down the line,” she said. She still intends to major in linguistics. But she also plans to take an introductory computer-science course next fall — something she hadn’t considered before.
That is exactly how Bryn Mawr’s Digital Competencies program is supposed to work. No, the Pennsylvania college doesn’t expect all of its students to take a computer-science course, as Ong plans to. But her experience illustrates something important about the college’s approach. Some students may seek out training in digital skills. But even those who don’t will encounter the competencies over and over again, because they’re baked into courses, internships, and campus events. And that encounter is something they can build on, refining those skills and adding new ones as their college careers unfold.
The idea is to make the competencies something “students can’t escape,” said Michelle M. Francl, a professor of chemistry and chair of the department, who has long championed teaching digital skills. “And it’s a way to emphasize to students that this isn’t an add-on. It’s part of what all the different fields do.” Digital skills, in other words, aren’t just for students who want to work in tech. They’re something all students will need to be able to use in their postcollege lives.
“We owe it to our students to both give them these skills and give them a way of talking about the skills that they have,” said Teresa Wallace, a member of the college’s board. This is particularly true at a women’s college, Wallace said, because women tend to discount the skills they have. And while focusing on digital competencies might not seem like the most obvious job for a liberal-arts college, Wallace added, Bryn Mawr is not merely providing technical training. It’s asking students to think critically and to form connections among their projects for different courses and to what they do beyond the classroom, too.
Today’s traditional-age students are digital natives. Google and Wi-Fi have been available for as long as they can remember; the first iPhone came out when they were in elementary school. But there’s a difference between familiarity and understanding. Quickly finding information online doesn’t mean you know how to evaluate its trustworthiness. Growing up using apps doesn’t mean you know how to build one. Some students are digitally savvy when they begin college. But others are not. How can a college ensure that all of its students graduate with the digital skills they will need to thrive in their careers and beyond?
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Professors at Bryn Mawr have wrestled with that question for years. It came to the fore after the college received a Next Generation Learning Challenges grant, in 2011, that led to a major focus on blended learning, in which students complete work on their own online in advance of attending in-person class sessions.
As more and more courses employed that format, said Gina Siesing, chief information officer and director of libraries, professors realized “that students had different levels of preparation in terms of agility, working both on their sort of self-paced online activities and also on digital projects that were expected parts of assignments.” Some professors pushed the college to do more to help students learn those skills.
The college’s board, meanwhile, had created a task force to take a broad look at its use of digital technology, including its application in teaching and learning. One result: a directive that the college ensure students gain the digital skills they need as part of their liberal-arts education.
Those bottom-up and top-down concerns about preparing students — and positioning the college — for the future came together, Siesing said. Eventually the college developed a framework of specific skills grouped into five broad categories: Digital Survival Skills; Digital Communication; Data Management and Preservation; Data Analysis and Presentation; and Critical Making, Design, and Development.
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The competencies, which were unveiled in 2017, are intended more as a map than a set of directions. “It was very important to us,” Siesing said, “that we not give the illusion that if you check a lot of boxes you are a digital master.” Indeed, the college’s leaders don’t believe it’s possible to give students the entire digital tool kit they’ll need for the future, not least because some of the tools they’ll end up using probably don’t exist yet. In keeping with its liberal-arts orientation, then, part of what Bryn Mawr is doing with the competencies is helping students learn how to learn.
Instead of ticking off a checklist, the idea is that students pick up skills in context as a matter of course throughout their time in college. Students may also seek out experiences they would not have otherwise for the specific purpose of honing a particular digital skill. No two students, then, will have the exact same skill set or the exact same path to acquiring those skills — something that’s also true of a liberal-arts education in general.
Still, every student is supposed to have a good skill set and a good experience. One way the college makes the competencies hard for students to miss is making it easy for professors to incorporate digital skills into their courses.
Sometimes professors worry that teaching digital skills will crowd out something else that their students really need to learn. Shiamin Kwa used to feel that way.
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That’s in part because Kwa, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures, was thinking of digital skills as something she’d have to learn about, and then graft onto a course. She could see how that might be useful for students, but it was hard to make it a priority. “I study literature,” she said, “so for me, it’s about the book and holding the page.”
But then she thought about how technology has changed the way she conducts her scholarship. Early in her career, Kwa said, the intellectually challenging work of translation included a fair bit of grunt work. To look up a Chinese character in her dictionary, Kwa would have to count how many strokes it was composed of before seeking it out in an index. Today she uses an app that pulls up a character when she hand-writes it on a touch screen. “It’s completely changed the way I read a text,” she said.
Kwa could imagine sharing that process with students in her Chinese-literature course, which uses English translations and is taken by many students who do not read Chinese. Even so, the process would involve its own grunt work: checking out iPads, loading the app, making sure they were charged and working correctly.
We owe it to our students to both give them these skills and give them a way of talking about the skills that they have.
But because of the support Bryn Mawr offers professors, Kwa doesn’t have to figure out this kind of thing on her own. She has applied for — and received — seed funding from the college to support the incorporation of digital elements into two of her courses, including the Chinese-literature one, which since 2015 has included a session in which students learn to use the translation app.
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On the day Kwa used the app, a member of the college’s IT-support staff came to the class with the 15 or so iPads she would need charged and ready to go, and stayed for a while to make sure no one had trouble.
If Kwa hadn’t had that kind of support, she said, she might have demonstrated the dictionary app in class, but she’s not sure she’d have given students the chance to actually use it themselves. “I might not have been willing to invest that time,” she said, “for one 65-minute class.”
Kwa broke the students into small groups and had them use the app to talk about how scholars think through which words to use in translation. She had wondered if using the app might give students the wrong idea about translation work, suggesting that it could be automated.
Instead, the exercise helped give students a taste of the kind of hard work that researchers in Kwa’s field really do. “It became an opportunity for students to collaborate,” she said, “to really think closely about the text.”
Digital skills, in this view, aren’t just a way to make liberal-arts graduates marketable. Taught well, they can deepen the education those students receive.
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Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Beckie Supiano is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she covers teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. She is also a co-author of The Chronicle’s free, weekly Teaching newsletter that focuses on what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.