Expanding the Digital Curriculum

For today’s students, simply knowing how to process words on a computer, manipulate video-game controls, and load a smartphone with apps no longer qualifies as digital literacy. To find jobs and succeed at them, college and industry leaders say, students require multifaceted knowledge of how the technology they use works, as well as an understanding of the full range of what they can do with it.

Alongside advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other workplace tools, colleges and universities are beginning to form programs designed to ensure that every student has a chance to become digitally fluent. They are responding to calls from employers and students themselves by finding myriad ways to embed digital-skills training into undergraduate and continuing education.

Their efforts represent an emerging trend, though hardly a monolithic one. There is as wide a variety of approaches as there are colleges. In this report, we’ll examine the different efforts to position digital-skills education within a wide range of existing courses and majors, what skills are being taught, and the stumbling blocks that colleges have navigated in putting these programs into effect. While the interviews for this report were conducted before the widespread outbreak of Covid-19 in the United States, the health emergency may have sped up some of the trends that are explored here.

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