Models and guidelines for the design and development of  digital teaching and learning in higher education

This eBook provides pedagogical models and guidelines for designing and developing teaching and learning in digital higher education.

After COVID, there was a shift from emergency practices to the “new normal” led by innovative digital pedagogies. The BLOOM hub presents a series of models and guidelines for key educational formats for digital higher education courses and programmes, international collaboration and mobility and institutional policies and strategies related to this. These digital pedagogies need to be strengthened and consolidated to modernize European higher education.

Three main approaches appear to be making a breakthrough in digital teaching and learning practices in higher education institutions: synchronous hybrid, blended and online distance education. Research and development have now resulted in strong design models for each of these approaches. Leadership needs to be shared at all levels of a higher education institution to innovate higher education policies and strategies through digitization. Organizational and budgetary conditions must be created to support this development. Quality assurance must be adapted to digitization and integrated into internal and external quality assurance frameworks.

The other BLOOM eBooks focus on specific models and guidelines for digital collaboration and mobility, which contribute to the quality, access and cost-effectiveness of internationalization, notably in joint degree education and micro-credential courses and programmes. EUI alliances see such collaborations as their core business.

The starting point for the guidelines is “teaching as a design science” (Laurillard, 2012): teaching methods as presented on the BLOOM hub should be the subject of successive design steps, in which teachers and programme boards take the lead, supported by teaching and learning and educational ICT support services. The design, development and implementation of digital education must be adapted to the objectives and characteristics of learners, which differ in the three areas of higher education provisions: degree education, continuing education and professional development, and open education (MOOCs). More flexibility is needed in both continuing education and internationalization to be able to reach students outside the campus and to develop sufficient scalability. This flexibility is supported by digitalization.

This eBook is based on a long experience in the educational development in European higher education institutions at all levels and on expertise derived from recent European projects.