Introducing Digital Educational Tools into a Traditional Liberal Arts Education Program: An Exploratory Case Study

摘要

A liberal arts education prepares students for a successful career by providing the tools for critical thinking, performance in a team setting, and drawing awareness of and connections to different social, economic, political, and demographic differences in the larger society (Weis, et al. 2002). Traditionally, the delivery of a liberal arts education has been a face-to-face lecture/discussion/research format with little to no incorporation of technology. With the availability of digital tools for teaching and learning and the pervasiveness of digital tools in the lives of the students that colleges serve, liberal arts faculty over time have been presented with an opportunity to introduce digital tools into their instruction and assessment. However, the degree to which faculty members incorporate digital tools into their liberal arts classrooms and the perceptions of faculty members regarding how this process impacts their teaching and students' learning remains unclear (Georgina & Olson, 2008, p. 2). In this context, the purpose of this descriptive case study was to explore the experiences of liberal arts faculty at a private, Midwest College as they incorporate digital tools into their teaching and to document how faculty members and administrators made sense of how to use digital tools and related pedagogies to impact student success. Keywords: digital pedagogy, blended learning, liberal Arts, instructional technology, TPACK.