By Ann Byrne, Digital Librarian, Hibernia College.
Hibernia College is delighted to release its short course in Digital Literacy as an open educational resource (OER). The course was developed by a small team within Hibernia College’s Digital Learning Department (DLD): Irene O’Dowd (DLD researcher), Ann Byrne (Digital Librarian), and Emberly Davey (library assistant), with support and assistance from the wider DLD team. Originally developed to support Hibernia College students, the course is now available as an open educational resource on Hibernia College’s institutional repository, IASC.
OER creation and dissemination are supportive of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and this digital literacy OER directly supports at least three of these: SDG 4, Quality Education, where digital literacy skills are explicitly addressed, SDG 3, good health and well-being and SDG 8, decent work and economic growth (UN, 2015). This course also encourages digital citizenship. The Council of Europe (2023) defines digital citizens as “… individuals able to use digital tools to create, consume, communicate and engage positively and responsibly with others.” The project team hopes that this course will help to nurture digital citizenship at Hibernia College and beyond.
When developing the course, one of the biggest challenges for the project team was deciding what to cover. Digital literacy is a vast area and the project team needed to consider what would be most useful for students, and relevant to a wider audience. The working group consulted several frameworks including DigComp 2.2. (2022), JISC’s Digital Capabilities Framework (2017) and the CAUL Digital Dexterity Framework (2020). The frameworks displayed significant crossover, covering five or six key domains. The project team settled on three core lessons within the Digital literacy course, reflecting three of these domains: Information literacy, digital communication and collaboration, and digital Identity and well-being. These were created in Articulate Rise. The three lessons are accompanied by three Moodle quizzes and the course takes approximately one and a half to two hours to complete.
How to access the OER
The Digital Literacy OER is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. It is free to reuse and adapt with attribution. It is freely available on Hibernia College’s digital repository, IASC. The course is uploaded to IASC as a zipped folder which includes usage instructions. It can be accessed on IASC or using the QR code below:
The resource is also listed on OER Commons: https://oercommons.org/courses/digital-literacy-oer
