The Master of Digital Learning and Leading (DLL) at Lamar University is a collaborative learner-centered program that embraces technological innovation through collaboration, active and authentic learning, and the creation of significant learning environments. The fundamental principles of the DLL include:
Why: We believe that we must inspire and prepare our learners to lead organizational change using technology innovations as a catalyst for enhancing learning.
How: To do this, we create significant learning environments (CSLE) which give our learners choice, ownership and voice through authentic (COVA) learning opportunities.
What: We prepare leaders who can lead organizational change and drive innovation in a digitally connected world.
While technology is continually used to enhance the learning environment in the DLL, it isn’t just relegated to being another tool that teachers put in their instructional toolboxes. Innovative technologies are used as catalysts to enhance learning and when effectively employed, the technology disappears into the learning environment.
The DLL program is grounded in the approaches of Dewey, Bruner, Papert, and Piaget who advocate that learning is an active, dynamic, and social process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past knowledge and experiences. The making of meaningful connections is key to the learning and knowing.
In the DLL program, we create and model significant learning environments (CSLE) where the learner takes control and ownership of their learning. Through authentic projects, DLL students learn how to purposefully assemble all the key components of effective learning and create their own significant learning environments that will then, in turn, help their learners to learn how to learn.
Research and experience confirm that we learn most deeply through effective collaboration and feedback from our peers. DLL collaborative activities are structured so that students can bring their ideas to their group, examine and test those ideas, and then apply those refined and strengthened ideas to their own projects.
Collaboration is not used as a consensus driving process, rather it is part of the significant learning environment where learners are immersed and engage in productive thinking and problem solving and emerge with enhanced knowledge and skills that they can apply in their own classrooms and professional development.
In DLL the student will not be asked to sit and get professional development but will be required to go and show what they have learned through the creation of their own learning ePortfolio. The DLL ePortfolio reinforces learner choice, ownership, voice through authentic learning (COVA) which the DLL students are then able to share with their learners and their learning communities.
What is the COVA?
| C | The freedom to choose (C) their authentic learning opportunity and how to organize, structure and present their learning experiences. |
| O | Ownership (O) over the entire learning process – including selection of authentic projects and their eportfolio tools. |
| V | The opportunity to find and use their own voice (V) to revise and restructure their work and ideas. |
| A | Authentic (A) learning opportunities that enable students to make a difference in their own organizations and learning environments. |
See the COVA page on this site for more information.
As primary developers of the DLL program Dr. Harapnuik, Dr. Cummings, and Dr. Thibodeaux will be continuing research into the DLL and COVA approach that will explore student perceptions on how choice, ownership, voice, and authentic projects impact their ePortfolios, learning, and learning environments. The findings of this study and ongoing research will add to the growing body of research into how the COVA learning approach will contribute to the continued use ePortfolios as a learning tools beyond the program of study, how the COVA approach can be used to impact student learning, and how this experience transfers to students’ learning environments.
Sinek, S. (2009, September 28). Start with why — how great leaders inspire action. [Youtube]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA
Revised January 20, 2019
