Digital sandwich for 21st Century education

Digital is a core aspect of students' lives and can no longer be an add-on to modern education. A digital course does not mean taking an existing course and converting everything to pdfs and putting them on a static website. Courses should be digital-first with digital elements enmeshed into the educational experience.

Here is what a "digital sandwich" looks like in my classroom:

1. Before class (digital)

I am, on my best day, a modestly good lecturer (I have other strengths that I leverage to create a learning environment for my students). The Internet has the world's best lectures. It would be a disservice to my students not use the best available resources for them. My role as an instructor is to create a curated list of the best lectures.

I extend pre-classroom preparation materials to include book chapters, technical papers, and blog posts.

My secret sauce are digital workbooks. They are interactive companions that accompany the preparation materials. They a typically Jupyter Notebooks. There are embedded videos or links followed by questions and coding activities that check for understanding. This transforms the student from a passive observer to an activate participate in the educational process. Since the workbooks are digital, they can be automatically scored (often with immediate feedback to the students).

2. In class (in-person)

I spend the limited and precious classroom time working through complex concepts examples, answering student questions, completing worked examples, and sharing personal anecdotes that connect the abstract concepts to the student experience. The goal is to provide the unique experience and social learning environment that can not be had digitally.

3. After class (digital)

Much of the learning takes place outside the classroom. It takes time for a student to integrate new material into their previous understanding of the world. My goal is to continue to offer support and guidance after a student leaves the physical classroom.

The primary medium for digital support is group chat. Like everyone in Silicon Valley, the flavor of the month is Slack. I have experienced that group chat is more effective and efficient than email or forums. Group chat is an informal conversation with lower stakes than email and real-time engagement missing from forums. Group chat is also a platform for peer-to-peer learning. The many-to-many connections removes me as a bottleneck for question answering. Group chat is also a frictionless medium to share interesting links that show the real world application of classroom concepts.

Another aspect of post-class digital support are updates to lecture materials and exercises. I demonstrate the course is a joint production of both the students and the instructional team. I update lecture materials and personalize exercises on the fly. I fix my (many) typos, add additional materials, and clarity exercises.

The digital sandwich is my interpretation of Blended Learning, a refinement of the Flipped Classroom idea.